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Day 14


 
Wednesday, 7 April 2010
 
Start: Makarska: 09:45
Arrival: Graz: 18:20
Total: 651 km
 

 
In the morning, life looked much better again. The hotel was quiet and almost deserted, and our morning breakfast was served in a neat hall where smoking was not allowed. As we were the only guest there, there was no one to break that law and we gained new strength for a long day on the road. When we checked out, we had an unpleasant surprise: the price quoted was not "per room" but "per person". Somehow, we always ran into con companies on the much praised Croatian coast. Grumbling, we paid for our overpriced stay and drove off.
 
Just before Split, we found the highway that we had been searching for in vain yesterday. I looked forward to a speedy stretch of road. No such luck: one of the tunnels along the highway was closed and we had to leave the highway. Yet again on the tiny mountain road, this time together with myriads of other cars. What could have been less than a minute through a tunnel turned into an hour of nerve-wrecking stop-and-go. But we didn't lose our good spirits on this last day of our holidays and soon we were on the highway again, speeding towards Zagreb.
 
Sometime in the afternoon, we crossed the border into Slovenia, and so were back in the European Union. And to me, being in the European Union feels like being home. No more borders, no more money exchanges (well, at least in the sensible EU countries that have embraced the Euro) and, by and large, no communication problems. Unless you're in Spain and don't speak Spanish, or course. ;)
 

 

Graz

 
In the late afternoon, we arrived in Graz, our last stop on the road to home. We found our hotel Mercure without any problems and enjoyed a chat in German with the receptionist. The young girl was excited that we had been to Albania, and made us feel like true explorers.
 
Our room was huge, comfortable and quiet, but we were fit and eager to explore Graz, so we set out. We saw many nicely restored houses in the older part of town. Graz was European capital of culture in 2003, and the Mur Island by which you can cross the river is a remnant of this. The Mur Island is a sort of swimming restaurant and vista point in the form of a sea shell. We walked through it and exited on the other side of the river, right under the Castle Hill. There are three possibilities to get up to the castle grounds: take the stairs, take the longer path winding around the hill, or – for the lazybones among us – take the elevator inside the mountain. I don't like elevators, I prefer to have my feet on solid ground, but it was getting late and we wanted to see the castle grounds before nightfall. The elevator took us up without problem, and it didn't even shoot out into the open, sky high above the city, as I had feared. It stopped smoothly inside the rock and we stepped out on the platform. The view over the town was wonderful.
 
We walked around the castle grounds and gazed at the famous clock tower. The clock has the peculiarity that the minute hand is shorter than the hour hand. It sounds like a straightforward affair, simply reverse the minute and hour hands in your head when you're reading the clock face, but I actually had a hard time straight off. Obviously it's easy when you take a few seconds to consider it, but reading a clock face is a pretty ingrained thing, so you will have a hard time doing it on the spot. Or at least I did.
 
The castle grounds are very nice, with plenty of monuments and buildings, there's even a tunnel system that you can visit, but unfortunately it was too late for all that. So we decided that Graz would definitely be worth another trip, and made our way down the winding path. By now we were really hungry and, seeing that Graz was proclaimed City of Culinary Delights in 2008, we were expecting lots of yummy restaurants to choose from. Not so. Maybe we were in the wrong part of town – even though the Altstadt would be a pretty good bet for restaurants, I think – or we were just to thick to see them, in any case, we couldn't find a restaurant that we would like. There were several dark, stuffy and smoke-filled Gaststuben, but not a single nice, airy restaurant. We walked around for quite some time with our stomachs grumbling, but we couldn't make our minds up to eat in one of these rustic bar-like joints, not least because the cigarette stench was really excruciating. Finally we found a very nice tapas bar, they even had a non-smoking-section, and so we set down to a very satisfying evening meal after all. For dessert we had chocolate cake with hot chocolate on top. What can I say? Life was good again.
 
Afterwards, we walked back to our hotel. The last night in a foreign country. Tomorrow, we would be sleeping in our own comfy beds again.
 

 

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