Too close for comfort

The restless night was punctuated by the listness anticipation of having to get up at 4 am for yet another airport excursion. Really surprised with the amount of people leaving a relatively small locale early in the morning. We dodged a bullet by gliding straight through customs when the rest of the port was clogged up in their section. Still don't know why UK gets special treatment there. No complaints though as they passed us through the gate early, bundled as all into a bus and then had wait outside the plane on the tarmac for an overly long time packed like sardines in a tin and rapidly starting to smell the same. Flight delayed by 40 minutes so the stress levels about meeting connections starts to rise as does the anxiety about feeding a plane load of people eggs. Maybe this is Portuguese humour or substitution for in-flight entertainment. Or both. Green Fields, defined by hedgerows, slate roofs and grey skies. Nothing ever changes in England. The transfer at Manchester was a close call. As we had to go in and out of customs and bag handling the queues at each step of the process seemed to be set up to seeing us fail. What was a seamless entry 3 weeks ago at arrivals was absolutely choc a block with about 300 people in view and they stretched off behind us into the distance and around mirage obcucured corners. 3 people manually processing them. Would have easily missed the connection if we hadn't put our hand up and they very nicely bumped us up to the front. But the nightmare continued with the most rediculous, insecure (people get stuff stolen), inefficient security checking process on the planet. Maybe Brexit will fix it. Lesson to be learnt - follow instructions to the letter or suffer big delays. More chaos and confusion finding the gate and then great long wait to actually get on the plane (could see others getting off it!) And then delays in taking off. Not the we care that much so long as the pre-paid transfer is still waiting. No time for shopping. No time to update the blog. No time for lunch. A rushed takeaway coffee on the run. At least we got on the plane. A classic case of too close for comfort. The flight to Dubrovnik was OK. Enough room to move in the seat (take that Ryanair - you tight cheapskates) and it only took 2 and a bit hours to cross over multiple countries (and cultures) and land in such a diverse and interesting place. At home we'd get to Adelaide....

We have landed on our feet. Croatia has been the entire focus of the trip. Everything up to now was the build up to here. The views from the private transfer van were through clean windows and bordering on being mind-blowing. Every angle, every vista was picture post card stuff. Pity the blogger was using the other camera at the time. Being a rain god is a difficult gig. Little did we know that transiting via the UK would also incur picking up a pocket of their crappy weather and have it erupt out of our luggage as soon as we opened it. Oh well. Whatever - at least we got here in one days travel. On the bright side it created some fab images of a rain soaked sky catching the calm sea over a coast line that has been inhabited by humans for eons. Our acommodation on the hill overlooking the Adriatic Sea is fabulous.

We did a count back over the years. This wins. Excotic rating 10/10. Wandering just out of visible eyesight from the room we found the ability to stock a pantry, have a great dinner (at Melbourne prices but we had no choice) and wander home to write blogs etc.