This year, Mer’s European vacation fund got used for a tour of Croatia, Slovenia, and a quick side-trip into Bosnia. But first, we had to get there.

As usual, we took advantage of the cheap flights offered out of Toronto. Since Toronto is 4.5 hours away on a good (no traffic) day, I decided we should head up there Friday night and spend the night before our Saturday evening flight to London and on to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia.

The only slight hitch in the plan was that we had promised to go to the graduation party of one of Meredith’s students at 5:00. We figured that would work well, as it was close to home and on the way north, and we could treat it as supper; that would allow us to get to Toronto efficiently.

We got off to a late start, as seems usual with our trips, leaving the house around 5:30. Then, we were at the graduation party later than I expected, not leaving until around 6:45. Happily, the GPS estimated we would get to our hotel before midnight.

The trip up to Canada was uneventful – no bad weather, no traffic to speak of, and an easy border crossing. We did indeed get to the hotel around midnight. The hotel was very nice, and only a mile from the airport, and had a generous checkout time of noon. We took advantage of that by sleeping in late and not checking out on Saturday until right at noon.

Our flight was not until 6:40 pm, so we had some time. We grabbed lunch (breakfast for us) at the Subway next door, then we programmed the GPS to find James Gardens Park, which was only five miles away. The GPS found it, and took us to the nearest point of the park, which was a residential neighborhood with no access to the park (it was fenced off). It was not hard to backtrack and find a parking lot, and so we set out on a very pleasant stroll in the park.

James Gardens is a narrow strip of land that runs for some ways along a wide and shallow (and muddy, thanks to the recent rains) river. The paths were mostly in the shade, which was great, since the sun was out and it was warm.

We walked for about forty-five minutes, and then turned around. The river was quite lovely, and we actually found the garden part of James Garden – it was a large and wide area of the park, and there were lots of flowers about. The path wound through the woods, and finally crossed the river over a fun little pedestrian bridge that afforded great views of a road bridge above it. It was a great way to spend some extra time.

Not enough extra time, as it turns out. We got to the airport around 2:30, and were told that the check-in desk would not open until 3:30. We found a seat and I got us some food from Wendy’s, and we waited until the desk opened.

The check-in process was a bit lengthy and chaotic, but we still were at our gate an hour-and-a-half early. Better safe than sorry, I suppose. I started in on reading The Hunger Games, so I could finally understand references the students make. Mer kept reading Moby-Dick (her summer reading) and dipping around in her copy of Rick Steves’s guidebook on the Balkans.

The flight to London went well, except the flight was so full that Meredith and I could not sit together. We were separated by a row and a couple of seats, but in such a way that we could still see each other, which was good. In an unusual twist, I spent most of the flight reading The Hunger Games, which I finished and enjoyed, while Meredith watched a bunch of movies on the entertainment system (usually it is the other way around:  she reads, and I don’t). I finished the flight by watching The Importance of Being Earnest, so I had a very book-centered flight.

The transfer to the flight to Zagreb went fine, although we used most of our two-hour layover getting through security and such, so we only had about ten minutes to spare before we loaded a bus to go out to the plane on the tarmac. I dozed some on the two-hour-twenty-minute flight, since I had been up about twenty hours at that point.

We touched down and got on another bus that drove us a laughably short distance of maybe two hundred yards to the airport. We had arrived in Croatia!