Day 1: European Adventure

School’s out and lately that’s meant we are off on an adventure!  Officially, this trip is “papas 75th birthday” - Beth’s dad had the ideas a year ago to let Beth, siblings and family choose a spot anywhere in the world to celebrate his birthday.   We looked at a bunch of spots, but landed on Croatia in the end.

There will eventually be 12 of us - Paul and Blair, the Tyndall 4, and 6 Taylors (Brian, Melly and 2 year old Jordan on one side, and Stephen, Kristine and 1 year old Samantha on the other).

While the Taylors are flying on Saturday, we left late Thursday on Turkish Airlines.   A fairly brief stop in Istanbul and a two hour flight would bring us to Zagreb, the Capital of Croatia.  The flight went by smoothly, with most of us getting a ton of sleep, and one of us saying he never sleeps on planes but was observed to be sleeping quite consistently (ahem...Papa).

Istanbul airport had me itching to get out and do a detour there... man I love that City.   Abby agreed! We did take a picture of some bowls in the gift shop and sent it to Alex and Kim - they’ve never met a bowl they didn’t like (right before we left, Alex said “are you stopping in Istanbul?” And I had to cut him off saying “no Alex, it’s only on the way there and I’m not buying you any bowls!” - he laughed).  We had lunch in one of the food courts and it reminded of us of an extended game of Presidents played there last year with the Versly!

The two hour flight to Zagreb went by like a breeze and half an hour after landing at the new, tiny airport, we’d picked up our two rental cars and driven to our nearby hotel.   The hotel was just as described (we’d used Booking.com for the majority of our bookings and it was great as usual!).  We checked in to our rooms and headed to the hotel restaurant for a surprisingly great meal.

We’d all gotten a fair bit of sleep, but by 10:30pm Friday, it was time to hit the sack.  Tomorrow, we head to nearby Slovenia - can’t wait!