You may be wondering what’s going on with all of these “apartments“ that we are staying in. They seem to be a result of the short term rental market similar to Airbnb. Back when we were walking through Tuscany in May of this year, we started to notice these showing up on Booking.com. We’ve been leaning towards using Booking to reserve lodging each night. In our opinion… Airbnb has really lost their way. They charge exorbitant booking fees, and now cleaning fees that are tacked on mostly to increase the amount renters get for their units.
Apartment rentals appear to be units that folks are renovating in old buildings in the “old town” areas of many European cities. Most of these apartments seem to have been newly renovated in the last two or three years. They have so much more character than hotel rooms in large hotels, and they’re usually located in the best parts of the city. You just have to get used to communicating with the hosts for these apartments, but once you do (With the exception of Ivan the Terrible 😂) it’s a piece of cake.
Mostar was such a great little town that we hated to leave. Our first stop was in Medugorje, about 30 minutes south of Mostar. I know a lot of people from Fort Kent, and elsewhere who have made the pilgrimage there over the years.
Church in Medugorje
The Kravica Waterfalls were only another half hour ride from there.
We had heard that these waterfalls were really beautiful and that we are allowed to swim in them. We were well prepared with our swimsuits, in the tops of our bags and our tiny towel, for wiping off, that we’ve been carrying around for the past two weeks 😂.
The place is so beautiful, it almost doesn’t look real. We had a nice swim in the pool below the falls.
The water was a bit chillier than the ocean has been. Put on a warm day, it really felt great. We only had a couple hours drive to the town of Split, so we took our time and hung out at the falls for awhile. There were a couple of restaurants right near the water, so we had an early lunch, before loading up the bikes and moving on.
We had only been to Split for a few hours the day we took the ferry from there to the island of Hvar. We really wanted to see more of the city, and so we decided to circle back around and spend the night there. We found our apartment quite easily, parked the bikes up on the sidewalk (yes you’re allowed to do that here 😀) and with good communication from our host, we were checked in in no time.
Now…our plan for tomorrow was to drive to Plitvice Lakes National Park about 3 1/2 hours north of Split. However…when we checked the weather, they were forecasting flooding rains 🌧️ (flash floods), and HIGH temperatures in the LOW 50s for the next few days! 😳 Yikes! Not what we were expecting! 🥶
All right…looks like we need to make different plans, but not sure what that will look like just yet. I’m sure we’ll have it sorted out by morning!
