Like many of you, the hubs and I enjoyed an extended weekend to observe Labor Day here in Zagreb! We decided to explore Croatia’s famous coastline with our extra day off. In case I have not mentioned it before, the Croats LOVE dogs as much as we do – Guinness and Jameson even came along for our first adventure.
After a few days of planning, we decided to stay relatively close to home by visiting the historic city of Rovinj (pronounced ROW-veen) in Istria. If you Google Rovinj, you will see photos of a beautiful, historic peninsula with a tall gray church in the middle. This coastal city, like hundreds of others in Croatia, is on the Adriatic Sea just East of Italy.
On this trip, we tried Airbnb for the first time. Our room was right downtown, so dozens of restaurants and cafes were a stone’s throw away. We lucked out with this reservation!
The waterfront cliffs were about a five-minute walk away, and you could reach the “beach” in about fifteen minutes. Note: “beach” here does not mean soft sand, although the locals like to say “sand beach.” No worries, though. We still read in quiet solitude and walked into the clear, blue water. We managed.
There are a few harbors at Rovinj, so we saw many sail-, power-, and fishing boats. Seeing them on the open water, especially at sunset, was breathtaking. And seeing hundreds of them tied up at once made me a little claustrophobic.
Rovinj relies on summer tourism, so there were dozens of souvenir shops. One of our “things” we plan to do as we travel is to collect a piece of local artwork at each new city. We officially began this tradition with a colorful acrylic painting of the peninsula on a small canvas. As a bonus, a street artist quickly bent a piece of metal into my name for a necklace, so I brought that home too. Sadly, the hubs did NOT want his name on a necklace, although the artist offered him one gratis (for free)…
Another astonishing aspect of tourism on the Croatian coast is that most people in the service industry speak three languages: Croatian, English and German. The really ambitious ones also speak Italian. By being able to fluently speak those four languages, people in Rovinj can connect with a majority of their visitors. Feel like a slacker? Yeah, me too!
Long story short, we had a great experience for our first weekend getaway. We look forward to planning more spontaneous adventures in the years to come! Stay tuned for all them by signing up for our newsletter.
Love to all,
Morgan
