You’d imagine we had a good night sleep after a great dinner and an all in all awesome day in France and now were eager to see what else France has to offer, but…

No buts really, you’d be right. 😀

Today, Cannes. Movie stars and yachts… and fancy cars… and two awesome people you already know 🙂

Super hot days continued, but luckily, you can drink from the fountains and buy a selfie-stick. Really, you can buy a selfie-stick anywhere. There’s an army of people, constantly on the run from the police, covertly selling selfie-sticks from giant bags aka portable selling booths. Gotta admire their dedication. Thinks about making a movie about it.

We met Pinocchio, did some shopping, looked around quite a bit, didn’t get any selfie sticks. Cannes is nice, but (maybe we didn’t see the real Cannes) it’s not Nice, Nice is nicer. See what I did there? I might park my yacht for a few days here, though 😉

Hot as it was, leaving Cannes for a swim in the pool seemed like a good idea.

We still had Valbonnes to visit, Cheese Guys to meet, and cheeses to taste. Only one Valbonne and one Cheese Guy, though, but many cheeses!

Cheeses called for drinks called for snacks called for friends called for food… and you got yourself an aperó (gotta love French people) 😀
Add in a photo session, music, dancing and you get a super fun evening.

This glass here is the drink of the evening, and of the summer 2015.  Get yourself one over at Lisa’s where she tells you how to make one 😉

Now that we’ve got that off the table, it’s night already, time to get some sleep, long drive awaits tomorrow…

Fast forward 8 hours and it’s another beautiful French morning. Last of the trip. Quick swim and packing. Took us way longer than planned cause we didn’t feel like leaving, and Lisa didn’t seem to let us leave (“Just this one more thing”).

We’re still stopping in Italy in Lago di Garda, so the trip is not really over yet.

Motor roaring, wheels turning, lake Garda, here we come!

Turns out, lake Garda is so huge it feels like a sea, with cities in Italian style and lots of boats around, I had to taste the water to convince myself it’s not salty! It fit right in between pizza and ice-cream 😀
It was hot and damp like a huge lake on a really hot day (duh). We still had a lot to tumble so we finished our dessert and hit the road.

The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful if we don’t count beautiful evening sky with great clouds, and traffic jam across the whole Slovenia.

Home sweet home?

Early start. Big(ger) breakfast. The road.

Lots of tunnels and hills. Sign said we entered France. Yaaay! I could feel our “getting lost powers” wearing off. We were shortly in Nice. Slowing down from the highway onto the coastal road and city traffic with rolled down windows, listening to music from some local radio, taking in the atmosphere and laid back approach this warm pre-summer weather demanded was just like you’d imagine it 🙂

Sightseeing, posing, monkeying around, then food! 😀

With photos worth thousand words each, this might be my longest post ever but why describe it when I can show it to you? 🙂

Nice is super nice (so it’s exactly how it sounds) and I’d like to get back here and spend at least a few days to explore a bit more and experience more of what Nice has to offer, preferably with someone who knows the place.

Time wanted us to leave for Valbonne, so we carefully entered hot sauna, also known as our car and hit the road again. Travelling in our mobile sauna, following Lisa’s pirate-map-like instructions, at the end, 60 steps to the left of the big tree, we found paradise on Earth in form of a pool.

Sorry, yes, we first met Lisa, who was even more awesome in person. She showed us where we’ll be staying while we’re here, and then seated us by the pool and brought chips and cocktails…

She was super easy going, simple and easy to talk to. So we did a lot of that. Discussing life and some projects, current and future. Like cocktail we’ll be designing and shooting tomorrow and her upcoming “Name That Cheese” book. Time went by fast and we ate the pizza she made for us, before I got to pick up my camera. Some fast eaters… Looks at Jasmina.

Tomorrow Cannes. And other stuff…

Continuing where D-day left of. 🙂

So what do you do when you’re in Verona and it’s super hot? You eat gelato and touch Giulietta’s boobs. Summer came early 😀

Guided by smell of pizza and a friendly American, we found Casa di Giulietta, with Giulietta herself standing in the garden! Lucky us!

When you’re in a foreign country, you try to act like local people do, and with Italians being all very sexual and easy going, people formed a line, waiting their turn to hold Giulietta’s breast while their friends take pictures.

It’s all good fun and we’re told it sometimes gives you magic powers, woohoo 🙂

Ice-cream fuelled and with a sense of magic at the tip of our fingers, we steered our car towards our next destination: Valbonne, France!

Discovering the magic power

Italian weather was like Italian women, hot. And it got hotter!

There was something intoxicating about Italy that made us take the wrong turn. But not all is lost! We still have plenty of time to get to Valbonne by evening.
Another wrong turn. Doesn’t matter, let’s explore Italy a bit, take some local roads… They have trees, and shade!
* Another couple of wrong turns.

* Dead GPS.

* 2-3 hours of driving in circles.

* Empty gas tank.

That’s what it took for us to realize our newly found magic power: Getting lost in Italy!

What do you do when you find out you have a magic power? You use it! We’ll spend the day in Italy!

Went directly to the closest city on the coast, which happened to be Savone. First place we could find to spare a bed, which happened to be a hotel with a nice view, yay! 🙂
We settled in, went for a short walk, and the lights went out for the day. Tomorrow, France!

4 AM. Orangey hue appears on the horizon above the buildings in Zagreb. Two zombie-like creatures stroll around the apartment crossing stuff off the check list.

It’s D-day. Beginning of the great adventure. Next four days road will be our home.

People have done it before, sure. But we didn’t. And what’s better time to start something than now? 🙂

Here’s some background you might be lacking.

With everything tightly packed and bearing gifts for our Italian Kiwi living in France, Sun greeted us while we were filling the tank with gas for the trip (Tesla, model whichever, is still on the wish-list).

With new energy and alertness this gave us, we marked the road trip started. Nothing’s gonna stop us now!

First stop: Verona!

Sceneries changed.
Clouds came in.
We got lost.
We got found.
Got stuck in traffic.
Got unstuck from traffic.
Found Verona!

I haven’t noticed when the clouds first cleared but it seemed like we picked the sunniest and the hottest days of the year. Temperatures in shade went from 30 to 40°C. Needless to say, when you drive in a car you’re not in the shade and dark asphalt is your best friend. “Air conditioning”, you say? What kind of adventure would that be, might as well watch a movie about it 😛

So what do you do in Verona when it’s super hot? Here’s what we did! 😀

In a week’s time, Jasmina and I are leaving for French Riviera! Côte d’Azur, here we come!

I’m super-excited about this. It’s gonna be the first real trip I’m doing outside of Croatia. Usually when I venture outside of Croatia, it’s either for dance competitions or some other dance related business.

But let me start from beginning.

I’ve been hanging out with some awesome people with all the cooking and Dancing With The Z series. Azlin, being one of them, introduced us to Lisa, who was all like “I’ve made some tasty pizza, look, here are photos. Why don’t you and Jasmina pop in, it’s only a ten hour drive”. That repeated over and over with lots of great food, and she knows how to cook.

Finally, with Jasmina’s B-day approaching, I caved in and shot Lisa a private message. Basically, she replied something like “Awesome, here are cool stuff you can do while you’re here. And yeah, bring some swim suits and make some leisure time, there’s a pool too.” 😀 So, the logical thing happened… I’m planning trip details.

We’re going through Slovenia and Italy to get to France. We won’t be stopping in Slovenia because it’s going to be dark, but we may or may not stop in Italy 😉

I heard Cannes, Antibes and Nice are great places to visit, what else would you recommend?

We’re planning some cool stuff on the trip. See what happens 😉

I was here two years ago. Things were different. There was no road, it took some ‘hiking’ on the shore or a boat to get there, and I didn’t have a boat, so guess what it was. 🙂 For the last, toughest part, I went alone, my dad drove me to some point but stayed, no-one was crazy enough to follow me there.

Nevertheless, I felt connected with the nature and with the people of the world. It was positive. Good times.

Fast forward two years. People built a road, now you can drive a car all the way through. The shore as I remembered it was gone. This pier, a lone tree and a small ruin nearby were the only indicators that I’m really back.

But this time I wasn’t alone (nor lonely). I’ve had a wonderful companion, plus there were all these people using the road to check out parts of the nature that they previously weren’t able to. Except, that same road changed the nature they are visiting into something more familiar, less wild, in comparison almost like watching TV or visiting a ZOO.
Since they didn’t know it as it was before, they lost nothing, only gained a new experience, so they were laughing, kids were running around, parents occasionally yelling at them, blissful…
The road will also make the land more alluring to the tourists and/or investors so new houses or hotels may spring up, creating jobs and opportunities for the locals.
And the nature isn’t changed all that much (yet), only the pretty shallow waters and interesting foreground rocks are missing, they surely weren’t thinking of photographers when making this one…

Times change. For better or worse, depends on who you’re asking.

Things change. We adjust.

This beautiful place is situated on south-east of Kostanj cove on island Ugljan, and there isn’t much info I could find about it. Sources don’t agree on most of what I was able to come up with… People either don’t know, or just don’t care. So instead of being a historian, after spitting out little what I found out, I’m going to try to describe you the feeling of being there.

That will make you appreciate the place much more than any (in)accurate historic information could.

This precious thing (st Jerome church) was built in either 13th or 15th century in either Gothic or Romanesque style. Details, eh?
It was rebuilt to a current state in 1996. through efforts of parishioners and congregation “Brethren of the Croatian Dragon“. (Družba “Braće hrvatskog zmaja”). And that’s about it. If you have any more (or more accurate) info, please let me know 🙂

It’s very remote from the nearest place you can come to by car. The usual way I come here is by foot via long, curvy and narrow (about meter or few feet wide) concrete path on the shore where waves occasionally kiss the path.
The concrete part of this path ends before you reach the church so you have to climb up into the thick pine forest and continue your trip. After a while, the forest thins down and you get to see a little glade with a tiny church on it’s highest point on your left and you’re there.

Even in the peak of summer season, you will rarely see people there. Sometimes they put up tents on the glade and spend their afternoon or a night or two but they are mostly just passing by to the Kostanj cove not far away.

After an hour or so walk by the sea, it’s finally time and place to sit down on the thin grass and pine needles, and relax, listen to crickets and wind, enjoy the sun and feel the unity of nature and everything.
Let it sink in and suddenly you have a different perspective on the world and your problems. Just allowing yourself to breathe as the nature breathes, solutions start to represent themselves in a clear and memorable way.

It’s quite unique experience repeatable only by coming there again.