We, uh. We..don't know.

8 April 2009. Wednesday.

The day started off a bit later than we had supposed it would, mostly for the reason that we had failed to account for our propensity to screw around for inexplicably lengthy periods of time. One of our favorite pre-departure diversions was a mashup game of soccer and baseball, which ended with a sharp line drive into the middle of the lake, and a failed attempt to rangle the errant ball with a bit of a lakeside branch. We were not fazed, and were indeed encouraged by the advent of a particular finding: nutella and bread from the Schloss kitchen. We also took three packets of jam.

Just before we left Salzburg, I suggested that Adam and I might give our manual car a try. After all, having grown up in the States, we were relatively new to the idea that driving could not be done whilst eating a cheeseburger and texting for sports scores, and that one should indeed need to pay attention to shifting gears and tapping a troublesome third pedal. Right around the time that the clutch started to sound like someone was running a roll of quarters through a paper shredder, I decided to switch spots with Daniel and let him drive the ten total hours to Split, bisected on our first night by a short rest in Rijeka. Having thus ceded the driver’s seat, I took up the passenger spot, and Adam sprawled in the spacious (read: miniscule) backseat. He and he alone was to be the guardian of our snack cache, which was comprised largely of the sorts of things that mothers get mad at their kids for eating too much of when they’re 7.

Our plan was to have left by 2pm RST. Given the gracious buffer between our planned time and our probable time, our 8:06pm departure was about half an hour early. We commended ourselves by eating Austria’s version of the Gala apple, a pink and sunburst-yellow beauty of a fruit which, while it lacks crunch, is nonetheless the size of a softball and was thus sufficient for our dinners. Onwards then, we sped towards Hallein and Villach and Lublijana, making good time and fighting back the stinging urges to sleep. We were sustained by 80s rock, several Beatles discs, window breeze bursts, and open-ended questions.

Daniel was a bit sick, so we decided to blitz to Rijeka and knock out in a hostel. Yeah, it’s that easy, we thought: navigate to a country which we have never seen or studied, linguistic fluency for which we do not possess, a map for which we do not have, and with zero idea about how to locate a place to sleep. Foolproof, yeah? We thought so. Well, the darndest thing happened, to tell you the truth: we ended up on a one-way street between a shipyard and an abandoned garage, small matchbox cars zipping past us, staring at an insufficient GPS tracker, and confronting groups of teenaged Croatians about the direction of a suitable hostel. Each of these is a circumstance which is, on its own, less than desirable: together, they are at least formidable, and when it’s 6 degrees outside and you’re wearing madras shorts, they’re nearly unbearable.The young man who offered us directions while the other chatted in Croatian was pleasant enough, but he had an extremely low opinion of the district:

Daniel: We are looking for this place, the Hostel Rijeka.

Croatian: What’s the..why do you come to this shithole town called Rijeka?

Daniel: We, uh. We..don’t know. But we would like to sleep.

Croatian: Yes, that is the good thing to do here.

We plodded down a graffiti-checked street to the hostel which we’d discovered, and then to another, because the poor man’s Rivers Cuomo who ran the hostel said that he was completely booked. Three hostel options later, we decided to park in the lot adjacent to a small lodge off the highway, and to contort ourselves in such a way that sleeping became possible, although not familiar.

The sun comes.

9 April 2009. Thursday.

The next part of our marathon journey started omniously: a bottle of John Jameson Irish Whiskey was left outside the car during our morning tooth brushing session, representing our first casualty of the trip. It will surely be accompanied, although we will try our hardest to make sure that this is not the case (so far we have been successful in this regard, having cleanly polished each soviet red can of the pint cases which we buy daily). Point in fact, there were many ominous symbols on the way to Split, which became our destination on Thursday night when we figured out that Dubrovnik was farther to the south than our wafer cookies would last us.

First, on the side of the road around kilometer 278, there was a massive fire in the center of a rocky expanse to the west. The plume billowed out across the rocks as if it had no origin whatever, but instead engendered itself from amidst the ruby stones and tilted huts which polka-dotted the Croatian landscape. It rose maybe 70 meters in there air, and eclipsed the sun when we laced back towards the coast, temporarily darkening the road ahead. We speculated that it may have something to do with the Easter festival which is taking place this weekend in the devoutly religious country. None of us being a particularly religious man, we did not have any way to justify this supposition, but we felt satisfied, and we celebrated our detective victory with a bit of a baguette which we had bought before leaving Salzburg.

Arriving in Split was simply the first of our tasks before finding the hostel which we had reserved for the night. Our GPS navigator, which we refer to exclusively as “TomTom,” lead us in concentric circles and mobius strips for not less than an hour an a quarter, before we found our site: Silver Center Hostel, affixed just in between the main square of the town and the sleepy marina to the south. The place is on the second floor of one of the set pieces that is used in Saving Private Ryan: an entirely cement building, the ground floor of which is home to a pile of thirty lunchpail-sized oblong stones, broken wall lamps, deteriorating stairs, and exposed electrical wires. On the second floor, we found ourselves in the middle of a delightfully confined makeshift hostel, four rooms and twenty-six beds in total, with the nicest hosts you can imagine.

This city is a very nice one indeed, but it gives you the impression that it is constanly undergoing an identity crisis. It is as if the entire port is the product of a architectural equivalent of some culinary experiment in which Roman columns and facades were thrown into a salad spinner alongside modern docks, cabanas, cafes, and promenades. The resultant city is our lovely Split, whose name fairly accurately reflects the personality of its scenery. It’s a strange thing to swerve through the cobbled streets and to see tagged walls across from massive designer shopping malls, question marks and famous faces painted all over the place, like a city-wide public art display.

10 April 2009. Friday.

We did a bit of the ocean today. About a kilometer to the southeast, Split’s only sand beach is the playground of the speedo-clad and muscle-bound. On this eyelash of a sandbar, they play this game with a little racquetball which roughly resembles catch, except that no one ever catches the ball; or volleyball, except that no one erected a net; or dancing, except that someone brought a racquetball. Adam and I ventured into the ocean while Daniel tuned out on the beach. We had shuffled about 80 paces into the sea, and the water took its time to creep slowly past our knees. Adam, the more courageous, heaved himself into the water as I riffed “Final Countdown,” and I doused my head in the tepid crystal clear water. Back to the shore we strode, kicking the water which started to slink back towards our ankles. On the shore, we played question games as we fell asleep in the afternoon sun: if you had to pick a president to come with us on the trip, who would you choose?
Jackson. Eisenhower. Teddy Roosevelt, we said. Daniel wants Senator Joseph McCarthy, for meddlesome reasons..