join the johnson journey: zipping through zagreb & perusing through plitvice lakes

Nick and I were originally planning to go to Greece and Croatia for our honeymoon a year ago. When we found out that we would be living in Europe we decided to hold off since it is so much cheaper to fly around from Hamburg than from Houston/Atlanta. It just happened that Germany had two public holidays in May (May 5th and 16th this year) so we planned our trip around these. Luckily for us May 16th is our anniversary so it worked out perfectly for our first year wedding anniversary trip!

Words cannot describe how absolutely perfect this trip was. Neither of us were ready to get back to the real world when it was over. I hope you fall in love with Croatia and Greece as much as I did through my blog posts.

We started off by flying into Zagreb on Thursday May 5th. We had to connect through Cologne and I won’t lie.. our trip did NOT start out well. We had an encounter with a rather unfortunate, ignorant American who decided to bash Germans out loud in front of them in the Cologne airport. It took everything we had not to say something. It blows my mind how dumb some people are and why they think they can literally get away with saying anything they want. Luckily I was able to remove myself from the situation and sat by myself for awhile playing on my phone :). Once we landed in Zagreb I was automatically in love. Zagreb was more just a stop along the road for us on our way to Plitvice Lakes National Park but I was truly surprised how much I even liked this city.

We just walked around for a few hours and explored the city. We saw some lovely churches and government buildings. We then headed out in our awesome hot red FIAT towards the national park to get to our hotel for the night. We stopped along the way to grab some dinner at a random restaurant Nick had found. It was called Petro-Rastoke and I would highly recommend if you are ever driving in between Zagreb and the national park. They even gave me a free tank top! Unfortunately it was raining a bit but it was still a lovely venue and we really enjoyed our meal. There was a huge fireplace outside that helped us warm up a bit. Afterwards we just continued down to the park and prepped for the next day.

church in zabreb

first selfie of the trip :)

gorgeous tile church

view from the top of Zagreb

the famous pale ale from Croatia. yum!

enjoying a bottle of wine with our dinner

awesome fireplace at dinner

Plitvice Lakes National Park is absolutely high up on my list of the most spectacular things I have ever seen. The number of waterfalls will blow your mind. Nick and I headed out as early as they opened (8am) and explored for the first few hours without running into many people which was very nice. To be able to see a lot of waterfalls without people getting in the way was very important. I highly recommend to go as early as possible! I will go ahead and apologize because I took sooooo many pictures. Please just take a few minutes and admire the absolute beauty of it all. There are not many words to express the beauty. They had gotten a lot of rain though so some of the places were flooded. At one point we had to go through the ice cold weather for about 1/4 of a mile. My feet were sooo cold afterwards but we powered on! Everything was worth it due to the gorgeous sights!!

let's go!

the road less travelled - the paths were like this... so crazy!

some flooded areas

the shoes for the trek

cmonnnnnn

so gorg

dont go chasing waterfallssss

those reflections....

largest waterfall

nick let me wear his chacos in the water - you da best!

nick with his bare feet

After we finished up at Plitvice Lakes we started our drive down to Split. We stopped at another national park called Krka. Although as a whole I was not as impressed as Plitvice Lakes, the one large waterfall at the end was breathe-taking. Nick and I stopped there for awhile just to take it all in. Once we wrapped up our long day of walking around and admiring these astonishing sites we made the rest of the trip down to Split. On the way the sun set behind us so Nick pulled over to snap a few pictures. Everything around us was just spectacular. It was pretty late by the time we got to Split so we just ate at the restaurant at the hotel (we stayed at a 5-star resort on my SPG points). Needless to say the food was fabulous :) The next day we were headed on the boat for the island tour around Split so we headed to sleep directly after dinner.