In May of 2024 Grace and I went on a trip to Croatia and the surrounding Balkan countries with Gate1 travel tour company. We went with 8 other friends from the Villages in San Jose, several of whom had previous experience with Gate1. The tour covered most of the countries of the former Yugoslavia (Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Slovenia) and ended in Italy. We began in Zagreb and proceeded by bus to Sarajevo, Mostar, Dubrovnik, Montenegro, Split, Plitvice Lakes National Park, Postojna Caves, Bled, Trieste and Venice over 12 days. After the tour ended in Venice, Grace and I took the train to Cinque Terre for an additional five days before returning home.
This trip has plenty to recommend it. Old town Dubrovnik was enchanting, the waterfalls in Plitvice were out-of-this-world spectacular, the medieval towns of Split and Kotor were marvelous, the scenery and pesto in Cinque Terre were captivating, and of course there is nowhere in the world like Venice. We had a large tour group of 42 people on the bus, but in general everyone got along very well and there were only a few occasions when the group had to wait because someone was not punctual at a meeting point.
One of the weak points of this particular Gate1 tour is the considerable time spent on the bus. As the map below shows, the tour had a peculiar circular path almost doubling the distance instead of a more direct itinerary. In retrospect it would have been preferable to begin in Dubrovnik and just go northbound with sidetrips to Mostar and Sarajevo and maybe skipping Zagreb. The main disadvantage of the large size was that it made the bathroom stops lengthier. We dealt with this by creatively swapping gender assignments of the toilets when possible.
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