As amazing as Google Maps is, it certainly shouldn't be blindly trusted. In the past, it guided me and my colleagues into a cow field in Utah and this time wasn't much better. The road just kept getting narrower and bumpier until it was one lane with thick forest encroaching on either side. It was pouring rain and we kept getting out of the car because we were bumping around so hard we thought we might have a flat tire. We coined the road, "Jurassic Park" due to its distinct similarity to the ultimately fatal drive Nedry made in an attempt to escape the island. Although we didn't encounter any poison-spitting dinosaurs, we did soon encounter signs with red skull and crossbones warning of landmines, a shocking reminder that we were driving through what was fairly recently a war zone. We saw several scary looking boarded up houses that we, in our dramatic mood, decided used to belong to people who had been ethnically cleansed, which may in fact be true. Fortunately, we didn't get a flat tire and didn't trigger any mines.
The Fiat we had rented treated us well, but it had an unusual feature of automatically turning off when the clutch was released and then back on again when the clutch was depressed. It reminded me of driving a gas golf cart. Maybe it's more efficient this way? We also had a hilarious time navigating the Italian language voice menus of the stereo system. It took us several dozen tries, but we finally figured out the commands necessary to play music with the iPhone though the car speakers.
In the morning, we drove up the coast and took a ferry to an island called Cres. The Croatian coast is quite beautiful, but there is a dearth of safe viewing points and a glut of untrimmed bushes that get in the way, almost as if there were a conspiracy to protect the secret of Croatia's beauty from the ravages of the Internet.
When we got to the top of Cres, a vast view of the Croatian islands lay below us and a mighty wind whipped up the mountainside. A flock of birds took turns hovering in mid air by simply spreading their wings, no flapping was necessary. A nearby signpost whistled in the wind. We drove on to a 4000 year old hilltop town, Beli, walked down to a pebble beach below and went swimming in the Adriatic.
The next day, we braved the hordes of tourist to visit Plitvice Lakes National Park, home to a series of cascading lakes and waterfalls in between. The lakes are also known for their unusual coloring and color gradients. We hiked almost the entire park, which in many areas has wonderful narrow boardwalks that sit just above the water and ferries that run across the larger lakes. There were also a few small caves to explore. The whole area was quite unique and I'm very glad that the country has been able to preserve it.
Croatia is an amazing place. Just make sure to stay on the highways and don't trust Google Maps.