#obonjan

Probably of no surprise to anyone, but do y'all know this was held in Croatia? Like, on an island right next to my hometown!

We fell asleep before packing yesterday, so we packed in the morning, left our luggage outside the lodge and walked down to the reception to check out before our last breakfast on Obonjan Island. The ferry Brought us back to Sibenik, where we still had to decide whether we wanted to drive home to Germany or find a new place to stay - there were still 3 days left until my boyfriend had to get back to work. Oh and it’s my grandma‘s birthday today so we called her right in the morning and of course we already bought her something. Back to our decision: we found a cute looking hotel in Brela and decided to take the 2 hour ride (without paying, so no highway)... At first, it was absolutely worth it - the view was amazing, the sea and all the beaches looked so wonderful! Traffic made it take a lot longer and we were soon to figure out why: there was a huge forest fire :( only in the time we stood there, more than 15 fire trucks drove past us, there were some fire-fighting planes, but it kept getting worse... that was really shocking to see and it’s really important to take warnings about forest fire serious, especially considering the current climate. I really hope everyone stayed safe! The police told us we had to turn around so we took a different route through the middle of nowhere, with crazy and dangerous curves, high probability of just falling down and narrow streets, that cost us more than another extra hour, I didn’t think about how long we‘d already been in the car. As we finally got closer to our destination, roads got narrow, there was only one lane for both ways and it went up and down very steeply. My boyfriend said he wouldn’t want to park his car there and the area didn’t look welcoming. We turned around to drive back and when driving uphill it felt like a - very dangerous - rollercoaster... not only was it hard to drive up, but it felt like we‘d flip backward any moment, like the front wheels had lost contact to the floor. We were so relieved when the roads felt normal again! That problem was gone, but lead directly to a new one: where are we going to stay for the two following nights? On our way, Split seemed to have beautiful beaches, so we drove back there, on normal roads this time using the highway. We took a break to - once again - search for hotels and found one that looked beautiful and wasn’t too expensive. Since it was close to our location, we decided to go there and see if any rooms were still available - they were online, anyway. At first we found locked doors. It looked like there was still construction going on and like the hotel wasn’t finished yet. Frustration came up quickly, we really didn’t want to start all over again looking for another hotel after more than 7 hours of bad luck. Finally, there were some strangers - sadly they didn’t understand English or German. I tried to explain to them that we were looking for a room and as they understood they called someone and gave me their phone - the lady on the phone spoke English and promised to come by the hotel in a few minutes. So we waited and finally (!) there were good news! You have no idea how happy that made us :) to not make this post even longer, the positive part and therefore the rest of the evening will come in a new post :)

Another day, another adventure. After breakfast, we changed into bikini and swimming trunks and looked for the south beach. A lot of climbing ahead of us, we managed to get into the sea without falling - not counting the endless times I nearly tripped. There was no chance of finding the sand beach promised in advertisements though, which meant we couldn’t use our beautiful round beach towels :(. The water was cold, but really nice. We climbed back out to get our snorkels. That was an entirely new experience for me. I’ve always loved swimming but exploring everything under water was a lot of fun and really exciting. I’ve also never really swam in the sea, so today had a lot of new things in store for me. A while later and already back in our room and done with showering, my boyfriend got an e-mail from the reception that they had submitted the refund request and wanted to additionally invite us to a dinner (which only happened because secret escapes repeatedly put pressure on them), so we went for a walk down to the reception to pick up our voucher. On the way, we took a few selfies - sadly not too many since we were really hungry - and I took three Polaroid pictures of the sea. We put our things back to our room and went to „The Kitchen“ for our dinner. Since we didn’t have to pay, our picks were more creative/risky than I’d normally order - but that was great... except for the coconut ice cream on the dessert plate 😭I hate coconut and its taste and ugh it looked like delicious straciatella ice cream and I was literally so disappointed 😰. They couldn’t have known though. Back in our room, it’s now time to start packing. The time on the island was far from what we expected and we‘re still not sure if we‘re going home or if we find another affordable place to stay on the way home. I hope the adventure can continue, but we‘ll see what happens - we will keep you updated!