We left Motovun, which is where Mario Andretti was born, this morning and went to Opatija, which is on the Adriatic Sea.  We had two hours there so we occupied ourselves with walking along the pathway next to the ocean and taking pictures of statues.  I'd like to download the pictures but we just tried one and after 15 minutes, we gave up.  Text, like this, is fine, but when we try pictures, the internet connection is just not strong enough.  We'll keep trying. 

One of the statues is of a man that we all thought, me, Stella and Beverly, looked like Winston Churchill.  It is quite large and he has his hands in his pockets and is leaning to one side.  There is also a statue of sailor who is sitting down so, of course, we were all over that one.  The two of us are snugged right up to him.  And then there's a wonderful statue of a woman who is holding a seagull in one hand.  It's out in the ocean about 10-15 feet from shore on a rock.  I need to read in our guidebook and see if there is a description and story behind it.  It's quite striking.  Again, when we get better connection, I'll upload the picture.

After we left there, we continued along the coast to a small town named Senj (pronounced Sane) that our guide told us was a pirate hangout a few hundred years ago.  Well, that's all he needed to say and we hotfooted it off the bus with our bandannas.  Stella bought a book about travel and how to pack and what to take and it said that you should never travel anywhere without a bandanna because it can be used for so many things.  So we both brought one.  Ron and Kathy Beil are a couple on the tour from Seattle and he wears a bandanna a lot.  He's bald.  He's trying to keep the sun off.  We hurried over to him to have him show us how to tie our bandannas because what better place to look like a pirate than at a long ago pirate town.  Beverly came out with a bandanna and he tied hers, too.  That surprised me.  I would never have thought she'd be up for that.  Anyway, Kathy took a picture of the four of us in our bandannas.  We look like a motorcycle gang.  You know, you've seen Harley riders take off their helmets, if they wear one, and they all have bandannas on.  All we need is leathers.  I had her take a picture of just me and Beverly.  I'm thinking that will be our Christmas card picture.  She said "I don't want this showing up on a postcard."  Okay.  A Christmas card isn't a postcard.

Then we drove on down the coast a ways.  I have rethought my description of the area from yesterday.  It's more mountainous, but the mountains aren't rocky and jagged like the Alps are. They are more like the Boise mountains that are more round on the top.  So we drove a long and winding road that was about like driving through Big Sur or the northern California coast.  And it was bumpy.  We turned inland and went over the mountains and we were in an agricultural area with lots of sheep, some cattle and a horse here and there. Very small towns.  We did go through a larger town, maybe the size of Kuna today, not as big as Meridian, that was the front line for the war in 1991-1992 between Bosnia and Croatia.  There is still damage on the buildings with bullet holes and shrapnel scars.  A lot of it has been repaired, but there are a number of houses that are just shells, no roof, no windows.  I need to look in the guide book to see what the name of the town is.

When the Serbs took that town, the first thing they did was destroy the Catholic church, so when the Croats took it back, the first thing they did was destroy the Orthodox church.  It was pretty sobering to see all the damage. 

We are staying at a hotel in the Plitvice National Park tonight.  Tomorrow we have a 3-4 hour hike through the Park and then we're on the road to Split, the second largest city in Croatia.

Oh, and I remembered some things from earlier in the trip.  When we did our day tour in Ljubljana to the wine country, the one where Stella and the guide were old friends by the time we got back, I forgot to tell you about the house colors.  They used to be light yellow, white, tan, neutral colors.  Now some of them are bright red or blue or green.  We even saw a chartreuse one like the fire trucks in Boise are now.  Anyway, he is just incensed over the colors that people are painting their houses today.  We saw orange ones, too.  He ranted about that for awhile and then we drove past some houses that have garden gnomes in the yards or dwarves as he called them.  Awful, just awful, according to him.  We laughed about it later. 

We are also seeing a lot of deer crossing signs and we saw two deer that day.  They were smaller than the ones we have in Idaho.  I think that it was the wrong time of day to see them this afternoon.  Maybe we'll see more tomorrow.  Slovenia has a number of bears, too, but we didn't see one.

If you have questions or comments, you can put them on our blog and we can try to answer them.  I'm kind of worried that this is boring for you.