"What Happened to our train?"

- "Only God knows"

That was a translated conversation that we had with our train conductor mid-way into a 60-hour trek from Athens, Greece to Hvar, Croatia. We were in a train station in the middle of nowhere Serbia, and all of a sudden the caboose of the train took off without the rest of the cars. A Serbian woman asked what happened, and that was the conductor's response. Priceless. Other interesting things that happened:

- I was the only person on the whole train to be pulled into a Macedonian border police office. They made me pay 6 Euros for traveler's insurance for Taylor and I. I paid a woman in a small windowless office and she gave me change from her purse. It was by far the most terrified I've ever been in my life. As the border guard was walking me to the office, he kept yelling "American! American!" to nobody at all. Phew. I finally got my passport stamped, and we were back on our way.

- Met a bunch of friendly Danish people. One kid started every one of his stories with "This one time, when I was really, really drunk..." We also learned that Danish people called Danishes "Vienna Bread." If we go to Vienna, I will get to the bottom of that...

- Played cards for hours and hours. I beat Tom at Texas Hold 'Em and several rounds of Cut the Deck. Both beat me senseless at Speed.

Here is our sleeper car from Athens to Thessaloniki, Greece. Six of us slept in here. Woah.



Bored already and only six hours in:



I bought this here soda called "Cockta" in Skopje, Macedonia. It tasted exactly how it sounds:




We did a lot of this:



and this:



This was our buggy from Northern Greece to Belgrade, Serbia. It NEVER went above 40 MPH, and quite commonly stopped in the middle of nowhere for a while. They checked our tickets no less than 15 times, and the staff switched at almost every stop. Not surprisingly, we arrived in Belgrade 5 hours late:



When we arrived in Zagreb, Croatia, our bus to Split, Croatia was oversold and we had to sit on the floor. Taylor sat in the jump seat up front with an old Croatian dude who taught here a few words in Croatian:



We finally arrived in Hvar, and had to walk a mile or so uphill with all our gear. No big deal.





Waaaaaay out of the way: