The weather has finally relented and we managed a decent night sleep. Leaving Paris and heading for Zagreb, Croatia had us up early and packing. As we fly out at 12.20pm, we planned to leave home about 9.15am, with a 45 - 60 minute train ride should see us at the airport with time to spare. As we sped along the overland rail out of the city, I must admit, it occurred to me the 1.90 euro fare we paid to board in Paris, was probably not enough.

As we alighted with about 50 other travellers, we were all greeted by two friendly transit guards stationed before the exit turnstiles. Lauren, bless her, was not familiar with the tactic of not making eye contact as we hurriedly passed. As I was about to lunge for the gate, I noticed the guard smile and gesture towards her… I could see the expression of relief "Phew, they got you, not me" on the faces of all the other punters and knew the game was up..

Fifteen minutes and 35 euro later we sheepishly passed through the turnstile..

Undeterred, we casually moseyed along, grabbed our boarding passes and bag tags from the automated machines, checked our luggage through the automated scales and conveyer (gee-wiz, how efficient is this we thought) and moved onto security about 100m further down the airport. This is about where it all came unstuck… Greeted by a 10 person wide, 50m long mass of humanity, before we could even dream of getting to the 3 person wide, 150m queue for French Border security! OMG! This is going to take a while…

Standing, standing, standing, walk 2 paces, drag bags 2 paces, standing, standing, etc etc, you get the picture.

Keeping calm in the knowledge that you are always in the exact place you are meant to be, at exactly the right time, we watched our time buffer wind down and pass the "be at the gate 30 mins before boarding" request, we became amazingly familiar with faces surrounding us. The couple with the cute baby vomiting chocolate milk down the back of Dads white polo shirt, the short, amply round Indian lady in the very colourful sari muttering to herself, the blind folded Groomsman and his 7 man strong Batchelor party on their way to God knows where, we were all there for the same reason..

O'oh, now it's getting serious, 12.10 and we are still in queue… This is where it became a little blurred, as if in some sort of time warp. Before getting to gate L29, both of our carry on bags got a second look through the Xray machine, we joined the wrong queue for gate K, we boarded the sky train to terminal 2 and finally running (yep, Dad running) the 300 - 400m to our gate, arriving (chest heaving) at exactly 12.20pm to find a short queue still boarding… I thought about it on the plane to Zagreb, and still don't know how we made it, but indeed, we did!

We used an ATM at the Zagreb airport to load ourselves with Croatian Kuna'. Even though Croatia joined the EU in 2013, it's government, and subsequently it's currency, was deemed too unstable to have the euro as a currency. I wonder if they still feel the same today?

Anywho, we managed to scramble aboard a coach taking us to the central bus station in town, which turns out through sheer luck rather than planning, to be about 200m away from our hotel!

All checked in and a cold beer / coke under our belts, we jumped on the tram about 50m from our hotel and headed to uptown Zagreb about 7.00pm.

This city of about 900k people is very pretty. It is spotlessly clean, fresh and well lit in the evening. We felt safe strolling the inner city streets, wandering through beautiful public gardens, we must have timed it perfectly with outdoor festivities, live music and market style activities.

Enjoying a great dinner at a recommended restaurant, we wandered for another hour or so, with Lauren grabbing the now all too familiar, twin scoop ice cream to round out the night.

Life is good !