Plitvice Lakes National Park

Adam and I caught an early morning bus to Plitvice Lakes National Park–I slept for a good part of it but when I woke up, I was greeted with nice views of the Croatian countryside.  We were dropped off by Entrance 1 to the park and park staff was nice enough to arrange for someone to drive us to our hotel.  Our room wasn’t yet ready so we dropped off our stuff in the luggage storage room, bought our park entry ticket, and started hiking.  We decided to start at the Lower Lakes and walked for some distance along a trail that ran along the lake.  “Where’s the cool part?” Adam asked.  Noticing a sign for the large waterfall, we followed it and were treated to a number of waterfalls along the way.

The highlight of the Lower Lakes being, of course the Large Waterfall, or Veliki Slap.

After the Large Waterfall, you have to backtrack a ways.

We walked over to an area where we could get lunch and then caught a ferry to get to the Upper Lakes.  The Lower Lakes are generally considered the nicer of the two but, in some ways, the Upper Lakes was actually nicer than the Lower Lakes.

The fall foliage made the experience of walking through the park even more lovely and I was almost sad when we finished hiking the Upper Lakes.  We caught a tram back to the hotel which offered impressive elevated views of the park and took a nap back at the hotel.  It was still only about 4:00 when we got up so we got a glass of wine in the hotel lobby and then decided to explore the hotel a bit.  We noticed a sign for a hotel bowling alley so we asked where it was and were directed to a building outside.  The bowling alley was actually being used by a local bowling league but, fortunately, there was also a room with darts and ping pong so we decided to brush up on our ping pong skills.

We had dinner at the hotel restaurant afterwards which was adjacent to their event space where a wedding reception was taking place so dinner was punctuated by the sounds of wedding music.