Well, it's been a few years, thanks Covid, but here we are back at it!
I realized I forgot to blog the Spain cruise earlier this year and I've been hurting pretty bad trying to think back to it and picture the day to day, so I decided to revive the blog.
Fast forward to now, how did we end up here? Well, we've been flaky as all hell all year trying to decide if we're going to go while our friends all committed back in February to go to the Sonus Festival on the infamous Zrce Beach in Croatia. We decided to book the hotel on the beach directly beside the festival and knew it was going to sell out, so we figured booking the "free cancellation room" was a good bet as a just in case. Festival is August 21st, so we had up to a month beforehand to cancel with no penalty. Easy peasy, right?
Well, I figured we had until July 21st.... until we get the email on the 20th confirming the credit card booking because I didn't account for the time change (insert facepalm here). Due to the demand, capacity, and scale of this festival (world renown party island and basically top 10next to Ibiza!), I will admit it wasn't a cheap commitment and you know how the whole sunken cost fallacy works.... so all that to say, here we are.
What did we learn, you ask? I'd like to say book in advance because festival, flights, hotel, everything was 2-3x cheaper if we had just committed back then than doing it all last minute, but the honest answer is likely "nothing". We're just proud we even have accommodations booked 3 days prior to landing in Split.
Split is the second largest city in Croatia after its capital, Zagreb (which we are not going to as we're sticking mostly to the coast). We flew through Vienna and the flight was quite the experience. It's like we forgot how to pack, fly and do all the things to be efficient and comfortable as possible in Economy, and even navigate airports. Right down to the shuttle bus at the park n fly in Montreal, pretty sure the bus driver facepalmed us a few times from Justin forgetting his phone in the car and running back, to me dropping my phone while trying to take a picture of where we parked while he waved a card at me (which I misunderstood for him requesting our ticket rather than he will give us the location where we parked), right down my putting the luggage standing up and it rolling away and hitting the driver on our way to the airport. Yup, that happened.
This was essentially our first time not flying with Air Canada to Europe, and I have to say (writing this to remember for future) that Australian Airlines have quite the legroom in economy, Justin had no issues whatsoever! But while I've never complained about food on an airplane (and even this wasn't bad by any means), the food and options on Air Canada are generally better.
I would rate it 3.5 schnitzels out of 5, for lack of food options and the service. This is a scale comparison to what we know pre-covid so we do have to respect the fact that flight attendants are just exhausted and done these days, but while it wasn't an issue, it wasn't the most efficient boarding experience.
Last thing to note on the fear of airports these days... there were no line ups anywhere (even at the gate), until we reached our layover destination, Vienna. And even here, no line ups anywhere aside from bathrooms. While we generally book flights with the smallest possible layovers, we gave ourselves almost 5 hours here, just in case with all the travel stories coming out these days, but it was luckily entirely unnecessary. No delays, no line ups, no customs here.
All that to say, this essay is the result of this long layover. We are now about to board our one hour flight to Croatia where we can start our adventures anew. iPhone on point with its suggestion, how creepy and handy is that?
Sea you on the flip side!