Journey to the centre of Croatia…….in the middle of a pandemic.
Updated: Oct 16, 2022
So the time arrived for us to begin our journey to Croatia. We were off to live in a lovely house, in a small fishing town, which we had never visited, in a country we'd been to on holiday twice.
We will get onto the journey in a minute but first a bit of advice if you ever consider moving abroad. Do your homework and wherever you decide to move to there is likely to be an expat community on Google or Facebook, which will answer all your questions and in this case our go to site was www.expatincroatia.com
run by the amazing Sara Dyson, a Texan who relocated to Croatia. Also make sure that you have your paperwork in hand as you're about to read on and discover.
We used to live in Hessle, a nice suburb of Hull and that's where our journey started from.
We put our house on the market, made umpteen trips to charity shops, put our keepsakes in storage and packed the car with our clothes and Charlie the dog and Lola the cat and set off down to Heathrow.
We arrived at our Airbnb and got settled for the evening, the following morning we had our covid tests scheduled so we could fly later that day. Our friend Gavin met us on the morning to collect our car because at that time because of Covid restrictions we weren't able to drive across Europe. We went for our Covid tests at 8am and waited for the results before we went to the airport for our flight.
Around 1pm Lisa got her results and we waited for mine, and waited and waited. After frantic phone calls we finally got the all clear and headed to the airport.
We arrived in good time as we had to check the dog in first and thus began the battle with bureaucracy! We got to the check in desk and immediately were told by the agent we weren't allowed to travel. I got my paperwork out and showed her the government website which says you could if you were moving home.
"Well you aren't allowed to travel to Croatia", "yes we are here's the paperwork from the Ministery of the Interior confirming we can can enter"
She then looked at the dog's crate and said it's too big for the aircraft, "It's an Airbus 320 and the crate is the right size for the dog and here's the paperwork from the airline confirming that it's ok" I told her. "Ok well it can't have wheels on" she replied.
That was fine as they detached so we got the dog out of the crate to remove them which was the point that Charlie decided to make a run for it before we could put him on his lead.
So there I am chasing our dog around Terminal 3.......finally I grabbed him and took him to the cargo area so that he could be loaded onto the plane. Lisa had to stay with Lola as he was allowed in the cabin. Initially Croatia Airlines said that two different species couldn't travel on the same aircraft but after I pointed out that one would be in cargo and one in the cabin and that they lived together they relented.
I was gone for ages as I had to wait with Charlie until he could be loaded and eventually I reappeared to go through security. They pulled me and Lola aside and we went into another room to have his bag searched.
Once that was done we boarded the plane and awaited takeoff at around 7pm. The flight was uneventful and as you can imagine worried about Charlie being in the cargo hold the whole time.
We breezed through immigration and went to the baggage collection hall and there he was waiting in his crate as right as rain and pleased to see us. We let him out and this time made sure his lead was on and popped Lola inside Charlie's crate and walked towards customs.
We gave the customs man the cat and dog's paperwork. He scanned Charlie's microchip and said you can go, "what about the cat?" I gestured towards the crate, and I'm not sure if he thought we had a leopard inside a crate but just said no problem and waved us through.
So that was it we were in Croatia! Lisa set about dismantling the dog's crate and I went to collect the hire car as we still had a three and a half hour drive to Novigrad.
With the hire car packed we set out on the road to Novigrad. The first thing that struck us was how good the roads are and how empty they were. Unless you are near a big city Croatian motorways apart from in the summer will rarely have any traffic on them.
We finally turned off the motorway and started to make our way down the small road to Novigrad.
Finally we arrived in Novigrad to be met by Dolores's husband Lovre who had kindly waited up for us to give us the keys. We entered the house.....
It was beautiful. A two storey Croatian stone house which we found out later was her grandad's converted pig barn that Lovre and Dolores had built. They had left us a typical Dalmatian cheese and Prsut board which was a welcome site after the long journey.
We climbed the spiral staircase to bed and like two kids excited for Christmas morning couldn't wait to see what the town looked like in daylight.
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