Over 11 hours on a bus!! We arrived in Split at around 6 AM on a Monday morning. Needless to say the woman at our hostel was not really pleased to see us when we rang the doorbell (even though the signs pointing us to the door said open 24 hours). We had to drop our bags off and kill another 5 hours or so until we could check in properly. To top things off, it had started raining just as we stepped off the bus. There had been thunderstorms all around from just before we go on the bus until an hour or so before we arrived in Split, making for some nice scenes out the bus window.

Anyhow, we didn't get too wet, and found a comfy cafe to kill some time with a coffee/hot chocolate. The cafe culture is pretty big over here. We didn't see many restaraunts around in Split, but cafes everywhere.

Once we got to the hostel, the lady running the show (a bit happier by this time of day) told us that the dorm we booked was full, and luckily for us we had a double room - with cable TV!! Now ordinarily this would just be OK, but since it rained on and off for most of our stay here we were so happy to be able to watch some movies and old episodes of Married with Children, Full House, The Cosby Show, Family Matters (I think - The one with Steve Urkel in it - please correct me if I'm wrong, but the title was in Croatian), and a few of the typical crime/lawyer shows that always seem to be on back home. It was great to be able to relax in front of the telly for a while.

We saw most of the main sights in Split pretty quickly, not that there was a lot to see. Just a pretty typical old town with narrow stone streets. We didn't get a chance to try out the beach due to the rain, but we're headed to some islands today, and the weather's supposed to improve so we should be able to hit the beaches hard.

Croatian laws about selling rip-offs of brand name products are obviously pretty non-existent. Both Here and in Rovinj there were stalls everywhere selling the sunnies, bags and belts that the Italians had to scurry around dodging the cops with. I guess that's Eastern Europe for you.

We've booked a couple more flights for our Estonian beer festival leg over the last day or two; we got a really cheap flight from Split to London on the 18th June (to be in the UK for Goodwood Festival of Speed), then a reasonably cheap one from London to Tallinn on the 4th July (to be there for the festival from 4th to 8th. After that we'll make out way briefly through Scandinavia towards the European grand prix at the Nurburgring in Germany (if I can sort out tickets and accomodation). That's about as far as we could hope to have even roughly mapped out. Possibly Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam after that in an order to be determined by cheap flights that we can find.

Oh well, typing on the ferry is making me a bit seasick, so I better go before I spew on my laptop.

Bog, Paul.