20sb Blog swap

This post is part of the 20sb blog swap.  Mariel blogs over at Silly Style which is where you can find my summer themed post.  It involved wasps, throwing up and a letter from my grandmother.  I'm very jealous of Mariel's travels.  Check out her blog for beautiful photos and more travel tales.

Summer is my favorite season of the year. I’m currently living in northern Italy, so it’s usually cloudy and cold. The good thing about living here is that you get to travel to many different countries with low cost European companies, such as Ryan Air.

So this summer, my husband and I decided to go to Croatia. We had no idea of where to stay or what to do there, but we were sure we were going to have lots of fun. 
We took the bus from Trieste (Italy) and moved all the way down to Zadar (Croatia). We stayed there for three days and we visited Zadar’s old town and its port. There lots of tourists, but unlike many other European cities where you can hear people speaking Spanish, English, and German, I noticed that in Zadar there were mostly English people and Eastern Europeans (Austria, Slovakia, and Poland). 

After Zadar, we moved down to Split and took a ferry to Hvar (island). A soon as I saw Hvar and its coastline, I knew it was going to be hard to say goodbye to this place. Hvar has the clearest waters I’ve ever seen in my life (well, it shares first place with Formentera). You can tell Hvar is a place where the super rich like to spend their vacations, but you never feel secluded, you always feel welcomed by the locals and they are always very nice to you.

There are other small islands close to Hvar and you can visit them in one day. There are taxi boats that take you there or you can take the excursion boat, which is usually cheaper and your ticket includes a lunch.

I know many people think that this is something difficult to do and expensive as well, but I assure you anyone can visit places like this, it just takes a little planning and searching and reading all the information about the place you want to travel to (Wikipedia, Lonely Planet and the country’s official tourism site are great references). We traveled with our backpacks and a really tight budget, but we managed to eat and move around for an entire week with our few euros.

To save ourselves some money, we took the overnight ferry from Hvar to Ancona (Italy) and we slept on the deck’s floor. Many people do this because it’s cheaper and by being an overnight trip, they also save on hotels.


We then took the train from Ancona to Milan, and another one from Milan to Bergamo, which is the town we live in.

It was a very nice trip. But now, we can only think of sleeping in our own beds and not waking up till noon!

Hope you liked my summer story. I’ll post some of the photos later today, so you want to check them out. I really hope you’ll like those ones too.

Have a great day!

Mariel