So, I’m sitting here in our little cottage in Finny, overlooking some stunning Irish hillsides and listening to sheep and cows bleeting and mooing in the distance. It’s a typical day at the Madlaw residence. We stayed up until 4 am carving a pumpkin to use as a prop in an upcoming music venture, watching The Woman in Black, or at least the last 45 minutes of it as we didn’t realize it was showing on TV until we’d missed most of it, and then of course spent the rest of the night watching 8 out of 10 Cats does Countdown, my new favourite late night raunchy, hilarious tv game show. So, after pushing away worries about my missing cat back home in Texas and assuring myself for the umpteenth time that our cabin isn’t haunted, merely infested with spiders, Chris read me Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince until I fell asleep.

I awoke with a start this morning at 11:30 pulling off my Adventure Time themed sleeping mask confused, as usual to where the hell I am. This has become a bit of a routine for me since we left Holland. Somehow my body still is confused as to how it’s possible that we haven’t been home in 4 months and continues to wake up completely surprised every time at my current surroundings. You’re in Ireland. In a little cottage surrounded by beautiful hills and stifling silence with brief interludes of intense cow and sheep noises. So yeah, after cooking some amazing homesick reducing breakfast tacos (Thanks to an amazing care package received from my best friend Melissa), today, like most days here at the cottage is consumed with pracicing music, working on editing projects, me cleaning and taking a bath (Because I’m freezing pretty much constantly). But I can’t really complain about the cold because according to the locals, this is the best weather they’ve had all year. They keep referring to it as “summer”, as in, “Looks like it’s still summer out, eh? I could certainly be getting used to this type o weather”.

We live in a teensy town, so small that to say there were more sheep than people would be a severe understatement. It pretty much consists of a church, a tea house that seems to never be open, and a store called “Duffy’s” next door to our cottage that is dutifully open every day from 9 to 3 and surprisingly sells gas from the tiniest little vintage gas pump in the parking lot across the street.

To get groceries we have to drive about 15 minutes into the town on Clonbur which is huge when compared to Finny, but in reality only takes up about 2 city blocks. But somehow still houses 3 pubs! Chris and I rate the pubs based on their wifi speed, cheapness of beer, and how much the bartender seems to be annoyed by us nursing a pint while trying to balance our laptop on the bar or have a raucous facetime session with the Wardlaw clan. The internet at our cottage is limited to 10 GB for our entire month, which means, no uploading pictures, or watching internet cat videos. (I know, it’s a sad state of affairs!)

But when you live in between to giant lakes and several towering hills, it’s a modern marvel that we’ve got internet or weird British television at all. The surroundings are so beautiful that it’s hard to really believe that it’s real. You know those fake landscape diaramas you see in train museums that are just made of fake moss and itty bitty plastic farm houses, and sheep are just white dots painted on the hillside? Well, it literally looks just like that. I can’t decide if it’s these hillsides that look fake or that the fake ones I’ve seen my whole life were actually just way more accurate than I ever imagined. My other favourite thing about the landscape here is that the stone walls that have been keeping sheep in their fields for centuries are beyond impressive. Many times they scale all the way up the side of these huge hills up craggy cliffs and beyond. It’s amazing to think of farmers, many generations ago, placing them piece by piece up these landscapes. And even so, despite their best efforts, sheep are escaping left and right. They are all marked with a different colored spray paint on their backs to indicate which heard they’re from. And they’re constantly jumping into or over things or taking a little afternoon nap in the middle of the road. Yesterday Chris and I were driving home just after sunset through a little tiny town up the road and I saw a man in a reflective vest waving his hands from the side of the road. My first thought was, Yeah, its cool, I see you, you’re fine. Before I glanced back to the front to see about 50 sheep come into focus all blocking the entire road. Luckily I skidded to a stop with inches to spare and all of the sheep stared, with their creepy little rectangle pupils into our headlights, backed up a few feet and then, all at once, ran straight for us! Knocking themselves over and into our car before finally filing past us. When we saw the collie dog happily jogging up behind them we realized that we had just driven into a full fledged sheep herding, and the sheep had the instinct to keep running from this dog even if that meant running straight into the front of our little Neissan Micra.

Did we mention that Ireland is one of 6 countries in the world where you can’t get car insurance through your credit card? It was either pay $1500 for insurance for this rental for a month or go without insurance and just hope you don’t get rammed by a herd of sheep. But we got away with no visible damage and just a few smatterings of poor sheep blood on the hood.

Most of our days are taken up with reading, playing music, going on hiking excursions and resisting the urge to surf the internet. It is seriously bizarre living the idle country life after months of traveling and hardly ever spending consecutive nights in the same place.

In order to stretch out our dwindling funds, we eat every meal at home, which means we’ve become best friends with the lady at the grocery store. Yesterday when we went in to buy eggs (side note: You can buy Duck Eggs here! They’re huge! And awesome!), she ran over to me and said “Hello! So good to see yeh. I thought you’d alr’dy gone!”

The cost of living here in Ireland is much higher than anywhere else we’ve stayed thus far. And as beer enthusiasts, this is based mostly on how expensive alcohol is here. Especially for a country arguably the most world renowned for being heavy drinkers, I was surprised that beer and liquor here is by far the most expensive. A six pack of beer at the store (even the huge grocery stores in big towns) are around €10 on average. And a standard bottle of the cheapest whiskey you can find runs €30! At a pub, a pint of any beer is never less than €4. Maybe we’re spoiled from the epically cheap beer of Prague, but I’m disappointed in you, Ireland. The most strange thing is that the cheapest beer sold at the store here is Budweiser & Bud Light! So Strange.

Anyway, that’s all I have for this short, scattered and random update for the moment.

I’m going to work on posting a lot more about our spectacular Holland adventures in the coming week and also continue our adventures in Croatia and on to Slovakia & Poland. Cheers!

After our disastrous last hour in Punat, we got a gelato to console ourselves and then hit the road back down the coast.  

 
  

We planned to spend the night in Split which was about a 4 or 5 hour drive, but we never found an internet connection, so after driving aimlessly around Split for half an hour we somehow got shot back out onto the highway heading to Dubrovnik, an historic medieval town at the southern tip of Croatia, now better known as the main filming spot for Game of Thrones. At this point, Chris and I hadn’t decided whether or not we were going to make the loooong drive all the way down there, but when we were precariously pushed out onto the highway heading there, fate made up our mind for us. On to King’s Landing!

At this point, Chris and I had been doing all of our hotel booking through priceline and airbnb at little cafes and internet hotspots along the way. We couldn’t find a single place with free wifi, and after getting shafted at the “San Antonio Hotel”  

 

we saw glittering in the distance, we decided to do a little off road camping in our car. We passed a few different spots we saw along the way, never quite convinced it was a good idea until finally, I was exhausted and pointed to a little alcove on the side of the highway and we skidded to a stop and arranged the car for a long nap through the night. Although we could see that we were near some kind of cliff looking out on the Adriatic Sea, Chris assured me that it would be safe and fine. Until we had both snuggled in for a good night’s sleep and he whispers “I know everything’s going to be fine, but just in case anything does happen, just know that I love you, ok?” NOT the kind of reassurance one wants to hear while in a car possibly teetering on the edge of a cliff right off of the highway.

That night, when we both inevitably got up to pee off of the side of said cliff, the stars were unbelievably beautiful. In the morning, we awoke to this stunning sight.

   

    
 

Back on the road, we drove for what felt like an endless amount of time along what seemed like endless miles of gorgeous coastal scenery only inhibited by the occasional super slow sunday driver in a non-passable single lane highway. Definitely the strangest thing about the expanse of the Croatian coastal highway is the very brief maybe 5 miles of it that is owned by Bosnia & Herzegovina! Yeah, it’s bizarre. You’re driving down the Croatia coast and all of the sudden, there’s a border crossing. Knowing that our destination is at the end of the Croatian coast, we were a bit worried. But a quick glance at the map confirms, yep, the coastline suddenly becomes Bosnia and then just as quickly, becomes Croatia again! 

 

The other strange thing about this border is that while everyone in front of us had their passports scrutinized by border patrol, we just flashed our American passports without ever opening them and they waved us through.

After a couple more hours of driving and a short stint through a beautiful mountainous valley lined with the most fruit stands I’ve ever seen in my life, we finally arrived in dreamy Dubrovnik. When you drive into the city, it doesn’t look like you’ve seen it in the tour books, because the old city, an amazing tiny medieval town on the coast surrounded by massive castle walls, is at the bottom of a hill and not visible from the modern part of the city. We drove around for a solid hour, first getting jettifoned yet again onto a one way highway going away from the city we wanted to be in, but this time it ended up being a pretty awesome accident (except that I had to pee, BADLY) because we got an unbelievable view of the city!

  

We finally made it to a port-a-potty and eventually found a cafe with internet. We’re two millennials that have gone without wifi for nearly 30 hours – we were in an awful state. Especially because despite being at the very very end of the summer season, it was impossible to book ANYTHING in our price range. We were immediately regretting our rash decision to follow the highway to our Dubrovnik destiny. After 2 1/2 hours and 3 Ožujsko beers later, we were still SOL with a hotel. So, we finally sucked up our pride and booked a more expensive hotel inside the city walls. It can’t be that far of a walk with all of our bags, I thought. And I’m sure we’ll be able to find parking SOMEWHERE. Well, the parking garage that the internet told me would be $40 for a night which I found to be unbelievably exorbitant, ended up being $70/night which I was absolutely unwilling to pay. So I opted for a little hidden parking lot you could only get to by driving up 3 very tiny very sketchy one way roads with cars lining each side that ended up opening onto this secret parking lot right on the water overlooking the fort. At this point, I’m grumpy because we’ve been driving for hours, got very little sleep perched on a sketchy cliff and haven’t eaten anything except a piece of bread with some peanut butter on it all day. I decide that, despite the lack of signage, and our lack of understanding the little signage their was, our car would be fine for at least an hour while we checked into our hotel in the castle walls. We lugged our baggage and my cranky self down the hill from the car, into the old city amongst a barrage of tourists and looked out upon the massive amount of stairs awaiting us. Absolutely exhausted, we arrived at our apartment over 250 steps later only to find a mean old Croatian woman who yelled that she didn’t know where our host was and was not willing to help us call her. On the brink of tears, we finally get a hold of our host and wait 30 minutes for them to arrive and let us into our teeny tiny weird smelling apartment with an AC unit that made raucous grunting noises predicatbly every 40 seconds and poured out the most pathetic amount of cool air onto our exhausted bodies. But I was so damn relieved to be somewhere for the night, I couldn’t complain. We took showers and decided to head back to the car to find a more permanent parking situation.

   

  

To cheer me up, Chris spotted a pirate themed candy shop (!?) and we went in to plunder us a bag o’ gummies (which reminds me of a weird song my 6th grade choir sang which included the line “I’m a rough tough burly sailor as tall as I am wide, and the oceans just an itty bitty pond with gummies on the other side.” I didn’t then nor do I today have any idea what the hell that means.) Liking a giant heart shaped all day sucker, I followed a stray cat in through a hole in the castle walls and discovered an awesome play ground! Things were looking up! Or so I thought. We walked back to our car and as we moved it into a new spot, I heard the old familiar crunch of scraping it on the other side of the car, opposite of where I had royally scraped it just 48 hours before in the Great Croatian Car Foible of 2015. Hot, hungry, cranky, angry, annoyed, exhausted and realizing that we’ve just further injured our poor rental car, I realize there’s a little white slip glimmering under our windshield wipers we hadn’t noticed before. It’s a parking ticket. Fining us somewhere around $90. At this point, I pretty much lost my shit, Chris was doing his best to console me while I was openly weeping in front of hundreds of tourists. On the way back to old town, a guy handed me a flyer. My first thought was, ARE YOU SERIOUSLY TRYING TO SELL ME SOMETHING RIGHT NOW? I’m usually the type of person that refuses flyers being handed to me, but I was too tired to resist. I looked down at the flyer. It was for kayaking around the city, that sounds pretty awesome. Except I’m sure its a million dollars, oh, it’s only $30…. Chris looks at me, so happy that I’ve stopped leaking from my head. “Do you like that? Would that make you happy?” I nod slowly. My first thought it, I bet that guy never thought he was actually going to make a sale off of handing a flyer to a crying girl.

We had pizza and beer and I ate my gummies and we resolved to kayak around the city the next day. That jug of beer really took the edge off of our 300 step trip home.  

     
 

The next morning we lucked into an AirBnB overlooking the city. A little Jimi Hendrix themed apartment in the home of an aging Croatian rocker. It was called “The Rock Palace” and so much more amazing than we ever expected. The guy did insist on talking our ear off about seemingly ever band he had ever seen or even been in to as soon as we arrived. But the place included free parking (dear God, I’ve never been so happy to have a place for my car to sleep) and a really baller view.  And despite the fact that it was the hottest day we’ve had to endure in nearly a year (we’ve been blessed to have entirely escaped the Texas summer), and this apartment had no AC, I was happy to have a place and a plan and head down to our much awaited kayak trip!

  

  

If I thought we had a lot of steps to deal with the day before, I was sorely mistaken as to what really constituted a lot of steps. We climbed down and down and down row and row and alley and alley of stairs down down down to the shores of Dubrovnik from our Rock Palace on the hill. I realized we would have to work for our view.

The kayak trip was absolutely everything I hoped it would be. The water was cool and refreshing on the hot day, we paddled around the beautiful island just off of the coast of the old city which housed an awesome old monastery (now made into a Pizza joint!) and a super cool rocky cliff beach area where we swam around a spooky cliff cave and paddled past a nude beach with dozens of naked old Croatian guys. By the time we were paddling away from the island and toward a hidden cove cave, my arms were killing me. Kayaking in the ocean is no joke. By this time in the trip, my legs had been conditioned from miles of walking and the steps and inclines and stairs of months of travel but my arms were unprepared! Luckily Chris has super human arm strength and could take over whenever I gave up hope and said I’d rather we be washed out to sea.

   

  
    
    
    
 

We spent a couple glorious hours snorkeling in a cave and cliff jumping looking out onto the Adriatic sea and the castle walls of Dubrovnik.

That night we walked up the many many many stairs back to our Jimi Hendrix apt and Chris made dinner for us. My arms were like really painful jelly. I was totally useless. The next morning, feeling a bit better, we walked along the castle walls with really stunning views and Chris nerded our on the Game of Thrones sights to see! We climbed more and more stairs, and then more stairs again up to the big fort! I sang into a deep and awesome well and then, finally having made amends with Dubrovnik, got back in the car to make our way back up the long and winding Croatian coast up to Plitvice National Park!

   

    
   

Home of thousands of Croatian Waterfalls!