We woke up relatively early to go see the Coliseum and the Roman forum. We ate spaghetti carbonara with the Coliseum in the background. We walked right into the Coliseum with our Roma Passes. It was fabulous.
After an exhausting day, we ate dinner, which was the same as the night before and passed out. Fo woke me up to take night pictures and we danced next to a little stage we found.
The night ended terribly with no gelato.
(Fo’s)
It was off to ROME!!!
We took a 5 hour train ride and slept the whole time on the train. Of course we ended up on the same train as Jeff and Juliet.
We quickly found our Hostel- Volturno Bed and Breakfast.
The owner was Santy.
oh my word.
He gave us lots of good tips, like buying the Roma Pass, which saved us a lot of time and money
That night we headed to the Spanish steps and the trevi fountain
We had bread with cream cheese for dinner, which was ridiculously good and we had some reallllly juicy pears.
And santy said I had a good heart… weird.
Today, we switched to Hotel Marcello, since our other place was booked.
It was SUPER nice and we got free wifi and it was FAST!!!
We were so exhausted, so we decided to crash for the day and head out around dinner. So we called Raji via Skype and confused the heck out of him. He thought it was his brother calling him to tell him that they were pregnant.
We called both of our moms and Forrest’s grandma, which was super adorable and entertaining.
We watched a few episodes of Glee because Forrest hadn’t finished the season. We headed to the Academia and ate dinner along the Adriatic Sea. After spinning through the Piazza San Marco, we got gelato and sat around the square. We decided to do our favorite thing ever and take 10 second timer jumping pictures.
The security guard for the stage in the square was bored and decided to help. He didnt realize we knew they were going to be blurry so he kept saying no no no no no.
We watched the finale of Glee and called it a night in our air conditioned room.
We arrived sometime around 7 AM into ITALIA!!!!!!!
We headed to the hostel we had looked up and they luckily had rooms for us. We just dropped our stuff off and went exploring.
We bought bus passes, which we never really need, they never checked, and headed into the city. We wandered around all day hitting up places like Piazza San Marco and the Rialto Bridge. 
After the bridge, we took a nap literally on the side of the street. I was wearing a NC State shirt and a lady walked by and said “YEAH WOLFPACK!” WHAT THE HECK??!
Then we headed back to the Piazza to people watch and eat lunch. We had delicious turkey and bread, such a nice switch from salami.
Then it was gelato time! I got Fruitti di bosco and Fo got chocolate and pistacchio…so typical for him.
As we were eating it, two people asked if we went to State because of my shirt. We said YUP and it turned out they were from Greensboro. We talked with Juliet and Jeff for a good 30 minutes and then talked about how we were headed to Greece. They said they used to live on Andros and told us to come visit {this was seriously our plan for a while, but we decided on Santorini instead}
We walked around more, took more pictures, and ran into them again. We found a cute little place for dinner where we had lasagna, which was delicious and had peas on it. Then we bought nutella and bread for dessert at our hostel!!! :)
Another pretty full day of travelling.
We finally headed back to Zagreb for one last time.
We thought the bus was going to take forever, but it actually took two hours less than we thought. We stored our bags at the train station and headed downtown to McDonalds for free wifi…which they didnt have…They did have ridiculously slow computers that just got frustrating. We sat on a bench and listen to this guy play almost every 90’s song imaginable. Then we decided we had to get rid of all of Croatian money. So we picked up some Surf n Fries. A restaurant that I don’t understand why it’s not in America. It sells mainly french fries.
That’s basically it.
French fries
So you can order either crinkle or plain and then they have 15 sauces to choose from. They give you a tiny skewer to stab the fries and they were DELICIOUS!
Then we got to the train station and played go fish and war til our train came at 12 AM. We slept surprising well and woke up in Venice!
So, we did not go on an expedition to the Kornati Islands like this one girl tried to convince us [She was like “It has DONKEYS!”], so instead we decided to swim all day. We stopped by Konzum, the 1st supermarket in Croatia, and went to the pier we had seen the night before.
T-Mobile was having a streetfest with rappers and Djs and breakdancers and graffiti artists. So we walked around a little, swam, took a little nap in the shade, retrieved fruit that was floating in the water, etc. We literally did that all day.
After sunset, we headed back to the snack bar arsenal, got some free wifi, some yummy pasta, and checked out hostels for Venice.
On our way back to the hotel, we were scared the expedition lady was going to hassle us again, so we made up languages, and Forrest’s language sounded legit.
So, after a beautiful time in Plitvice, and not wanting to leave, we decided to head to the coast, to Zadar. We caught the 11 o’clock bus and went there without having a hostel booked because we didn’t have internet. We asked the ladies at the bus station and they said there was one hotel and that was it. So after giving us ridiculous direction and us asking at the post office and them getting mad, we finally found the place. Everybody said look for the big beautiful building… OKAY
Anyway, we found the place. The receptionist said “I will give you room 48. It is a beautiful room. It was a little less than beautiful, but it was a room. So, we threw our stuff down and headed out to explore Zadar. We walked to the city centre and just wandered.
We found random Roman ruins and lots of little churches. We found a tourist place that was part of the “Snack Bar Arsenal.” It had a map with must see places. We had already seen everything, so we decided to watch sunset. We saw a sign saying that Alfred Hitchcock said that the sunset in Zadar was the most beautiful one he had ever seen. We grabbed some gelato and some cappy juice and sat by the sea.
Forrest and his obsession with water decided to jump in the ocean.
(mostly Fo’s pictures)
