This trip was interesting. Due to work travel, we had to postpone our yearly anniversary trip and were prepped to battle the boatload of folks who would have been traveling for spring break this year. However, with the global situation right now (which I will not delve into in this blog), it looks like travel has taken a nosedive. Our goal was to find the most economic trip we can and the low travel rush helped.

So, we went online and saw that tickets to Croatia weren't looking too bad and booked them on impulse. After some fabulous recommendations from blogs, friends and chatgpt, we packed up and took off Monday.

The ticket involved a long layover in our favorite layover spot - Amsterdam. As we typically do, we took the train to Centraal. Had our favorite apple pie at Winkel 43, walked the streets a ton, had some tea, and grabbed the best Mediterranean dinner at Esh pitabar (seriously the best pita and falafel I have had in a long time - it was legit the green kind we used to get in Kuwait) before heading back to the airport to hop on our short flight to Split! I'm sorry I don't have a picture of the pitas - wolfed it down before I remembered to take a pic.

We got to Split super late (close to midnight). Picked the best Airbnb ever - a stone house right in Old Town. Slept like logs and then woke up bright and early to explore Old Town and the Riva. Grabbed some pastries at Handmade by Biberon, coffee from Kava 2 (both fantastic recommendations from our fabulous Airbnb host) and began a marathon walk!

We walked through the entire old town and along the Riva for the next three to four hours. Found a cool walking tour online that we followed - https://jetsettingfools.com/split-walking-tour/

Diocletian's palace was amazing and so was the St. Dominius church and the bell tower. A steep climb but very doable and the views were fantastic. A lot of this construction is from the 4th century and reminded me a lot of Rhodes - where the entire bustling city is within the palace walls and the sea and river are right outside. I have a few pictures down below of the kings "retirement home". The palace is now a UNESCO heritage site and tons of restoration work is underway. The glimpses in the pictures do not do it justice.

It got super windy in the evening so we skipped a sunset we were planning to see on Marjan Hill.

Some other cool food we tried was cevapi (local street food sausage) and Kantina Pauli and seafood (at least for me) from Konoba Marjen. Topped it off with some amazing Pistachio gelato from Ela's gelateria. These were again recos from our host and they were fantastic.

Tomorrow we plan to head to Hvar. Fingers crossed that the winds don't get our ferry canceled 🙈!