I ran through the hot, muggy air, sprinting up the dozens of steps leading from the beautiful chain of lakes to the bus stop on the busy main road, in a hurry to catch the only bus for hours leaving the national park. I bought my ticket and sat down on a bench in a little bus-waiting shed by the side of the road. Wooh.

Wait a minute. I don’t feel so good. Why don’t I- an intense wave of nausea swept through my body and the scenery swooned around me.

Oh my. I suddenly realized that, excited as I had been to make it to the bus stop in time, if the bus were to pull up right now, I wouldn’t be able to stand up and get on it. Now that would be awkward. I’d have to sit here helplessly as the bus came and went, then wait five hours for the next one.

What’s going on with me? Why can’t I- suddenly my vision flipped like the negative of a photograph, turning black and white and all the bright things becoming dark while the dark things became light. Oh, now this is different-

And then suddenly my vision went completely black.

I was still fully awake and aware, but all the lights had gone out. Well jeez, I’m definitely not getting on the bus now! It will be here any min-

Wait a minute, am I dying?

Maybe? I wondered how many people died while they were worried about something of comparatively much less importance, like catching a bus. Probably more than a few.

Thankfully, after I blindly laid down in the bus shelter and sweat like rain sloshing off a tin roof, after ten minutes or so my vision came back and I gradually regained the ability to stand.

Huh. So that’s what it’s like to have heat stroke. I don’t recommend it. Thankfully the bus was late and I didn’t get brain damage, or at least as far as I can tomato.

Plitvice Lakes National Park is the most beautiful thing I saw in Croatia. A chain of gorgeous lakes of varying colors, some with an unreal clarity caused by the fact that they’re actually pure mountain runoff streaming across normally-dry land.

I arrived in the afternoon and immediately set out to hike one of the loops around the various lakes, with about a billion other people. It didn’t matter, it was still magical.

I spent the night at the lodge within the park, which wasn’t cheap but was one of the best choices I made on this trip. At night I could sit out on my balcony and listen to the sound of the waterfalls spilling between the lakes, the sound wafting up above the treetops under the light of the moon.

After a run-in with some bears while hiking in Romania earlier in this trip, a co-worker jokingly asked me if there were any bears where I was hiking in Croatia. I replied that it was unlikely, then immediately noticed the bear in the Plitvice Lakes Park logo. Oh, well maybe it’s just symbolic- I walked into the lodge and was immediately corrected.

In the morning I was up early and back out on the trails, much less busy now. And had them to myself until the late-morning, which was a great reason to go to Croatia all by itself.

Far down at the southern end of Croatia, after you inexplicably cross through Bosnia for a second and then are back in Croatia again suddenly as if nothing happened, there sits Dubrovnik. This gorgeous ancient city was the highlight of Croatia for me, non-lakes division. If you’ve seen Game of Thrones you’ve seen Dubrovnik, since they filmed all the King’s Landing scenes here.

Here’s where Cersei started her naked walk of shame:

And here’s where Daenerys flew through town on a dragon and burned up all those assholes who made fun of her for liking The Cure just a little too much:

And here’s where Daenerys walked around the House of the Undying over and over again, yelling “WHEYAS MOY DRAGUNS??” and the people who lived there were like “Christ, what does that girl want now?” “Leave her alone Harold, she’s high.” “Goddamned Brits.”

And here’s where I ended up on the iron throne at the end of the last season and everyone was like “Laaaaame”:

And here’s where Tyrion was like “S’okay, bro, fans are mean. Here, have a dixie cup full of angel spit”:

Dubrovnik did have exactly five things that weren’t Game of Thrones related, like the cool city walls you can walk on top of to take pictures of all the orange roofs and the souvenir shop selling shirts that say “Orange You Glad You Came to Dubrovnik?”

A nice little church with an altar straight out of MTV Cribs:

A wall behind the church where a priest carved “If you goddamned kids don’t stop kicking that ball against this wall I’m gonna piss on your little graves” (and this part actually isn’t a joke).

This super BS:

And number five I’m just calling “Assorted Majesty and Bird Shaped Drugs“:

After I’d seen everything the Old Town of Dubrovnik had to offer, I asked someone where they had filmed my favorite scene from Game of Thrones: the one where Oberyn Martell fights The Mountain in a trial by combat with Tyrion Lannister’s life on the line. I was informed that this was filmed at a now-abandoned hotel down the coast, and I completely inadvisably walked all the way there in the blazing sun to check that shit out.

And lo and behold, it was still there, if barely recognizable and some kind of hockey rink now.

That night I downloaded that same The Mountain and the Viper episode to rewatch, for the first time in years. When I got to the climactic “crushing his goddamned head like a grape” moment at the episode’s end, I was completely and totally revulsed, and realized I’m a very different person now than I was when Game of Thrones was on the air. Oh well. At least I got all this sweet angel spit.

Most tourists skip Croatia’s capital city of Zagreb, which is a shame because then they miss some fantastic vegan Cordon Bleu:

And the unique, heartbreaking and hilarious Museum of Broken Relationships:

The museum features artifacts donated by patrons, coupled with the stories of the ended relationships they came from. My favorite was this cell phone, which the dumper gave the dumpee so she couldn’t call him again. It was his phone.

This guy had a Godzilla covered in artifacts from past girlfriends.

My next-hardest laugh came at the Toaster of Vindication.

Amazingly, Zagreb even had a few other things not related to humorous tragedy:

On the coast of Croatia there is a town called Zadar and there are two things you go there to see. One is the Monument to the Sun, which is a big set of LED lights embedded in a sidewalk on the coast, in circular shapes representing the planets of the solar system. During the day, the circles sit silently in wait, soaking up the solar power, biding their time. But at night, when everyone is least expecting it, or at least those people who hadn’t been there every other night of the year when this also happens, the circles explode into a kaleidoscope of throbbing colored lights!

It helps if you are there during a rager that threatens to burn the entire city down, all the people of Europe having showed up to this little medieval town in Croatia all at once to rock the fucking place to the ground.

Sean: “I think I’ll visit this pretty little coastal town and see the colored lights. They’re probably meditative.”

Zadar: *OONSK! OONSK! OONSK! OONSK!!*

Goddamn, guys.

I wandered the short distance over to the other thing you go to Zadar to see, unless you are everyone other than me who was there to party like the goddamned world was ending due to some kind of pandemic: The Sea Organ.

Along the coast by the Sun Monument there are nondescript little slits and holes in the sidewalk, which secretly and quite deviously lead down to a series to pipes that extend out into the sea. As the waves come rolling in, water rushes through these differently-sized pipes and makes HRRRNK noises, each one tuned to a certain note. And all of them together create a vaguely sonorous cacophony of sound, not unlike a buffalo that fell asleep on an church organ.

Sadly, with all of Zadar partying like it was 1999 only a few feet away, all I could hear of the famous Sea Organ above the din was a certain sad wheezing, like the ocean had a cold.

Fortunately, I was able to return the next morning and give the Nautical Harmonica a proper visit while all the revelers were home in bed or passed out drunk in Zadar’s comely gutters. With just me and the sea as an audience, the Sea Organ wheezed much louder, playing a peaceful asthmatic tune as the rough sea stumbled and slapped against the waterfront like Bob Dylan’s slobbery lips abusing a worn-out Hohner that should have been tossed out in the late 60s.

Croatia has approximately 4 million dreamy little islands off its long coast, but given my limited human lifespan I chose to visit only one, Hvar.

Because it had a funny name.

No, it was recommended to me, by a leprechaun I met in a glen or something, I don’t remember, but I woke up one morning with the word Hvar in my head and so I jumped on the ferry and before I knew it I was being pumped out onto the docks at Hvar island like so much toilet water because, verily, thine shitter was full.

On Hvar you hike up the hot, sweaty trail to the fortress on top of the island’s main hill, watching as the view becomes gradually more and more majestic as the town falls away behind youOH wow! They have Gatorade! I haven’t seen Gatorade in months. The electrolytes in the Gatorade screamed when they touched my parched tongue and were pulled inside-out by my body’s ravenous need for hydration.

Up top I visited the dungeon...

...snapped the lovely panorama at the top of this post and I was off, back down into the town and up the clock tower, to see another orange-roofed view of the pretty town and the mysterious workings of an old big-ass clock, which had a little digital doodad on it that appeared to bypass all the showy mechanical workings and just turned the hands itself so the clock wouldn’t still say it was 1562.

Nearby there was a cute restored theater, where the locals can see productions of Orange is My Roof, Fu7ure Shock 3: Cro@ and National Lampoon’s Christmas Croatian.

A wander up the beach with a miraculously-located vegan ice cream cone rewarded me with pretty views, funny trash bears and more half-naked British people than my doctor says I should see in any three-month period.

The second-most popular tourist spot in Croatia after Dubrovnik is the town of Split. I badly underestimated this popularity as well as the rebound of European tourism when I rolled into town without a hotel booked and quickly discovered that every hotel in the entire city was completely full. Mostly becuase I think people love to say “Sorry guys, I gotta Split” and then disappear on vacation. What a legend.

It's kind of understandable though that this many people would want to see Froggyland and the statue commemorating the world's first selfie.

After over a year of pandemic travel, I’d become perhaps overly used to and enamored with flying by the seat of my pants, deciding every morning where to go that day and booking tonight’s hotel this afternoon. This was all fine and well when I was the only person traveling, but now the masses were back, and they wanted to wander around and point at shit in Split, all on the weekend I was there. Rude.

Thankfully I am the resourceful sort and I quickly figured out I could rent a dorm room at the University of Split campus. The school hadn’t closed or anything and it hadn’t been converted into a hotel, but for whatever reason the university was willing to take my money and give me some kid’s dorm room to sleep in while they were home for the summer, working at Croat Arby’s or selling drugs to middle schoolers or whatever they were doing.

And that’s how I ended up sleeping in Megan and Stacey’s room for a few nights. I hope they never realize there was a random stranger sleeping in their beds while they were home, because I don’t think that ended all that well for Goldilocks. I think she got eaten by some bears or something, I don’t know, I never finished that book.

It was actually a brilliant idea on the university’s part, they have these towers of dorm rooms that are empty all summer, at exactly the same time that the town is overrun by half-naked Brits and other tourists, far too numerous and moist for the town’s limited hotel capacity.

The one downside of staying in the University dorms, aside from the whole place reeking of acne cream and rohypnol, was that it was fairly far away from the tourist orgy that is the medieval old town. The first time I navigated this by foot, which was a terrible mistake, so evermore after this I arranged an Uber. During these unusually long Uber trips I got to know a few different drivers. One of the guys who picked me up was a real quiet guy, but I really enjoyed his taste in music as we slid through the avenues of Split. One song in particular caught my ear as it throbbed through the car, volume cranked. God, this is great. I’m really enjoying this ride. What song is this?

That’s when I realized it was Goodbye Horses, that song from the scene in The Silence of the Lambs when Buffalo Bill tucks it back like a lady and poses naked in front of the mirror.

Well, this car ride just got real awkward!

Anyway, Split had an Old Town full of the usual medieval madness, with tourists doing their tourist things as I walked around snapping photos, wondering to myself why the horses were leaving. Is she singing “I’m not enough for you?” Ah, so that’s why they left. Goddamned needy horses. I wasted the best hay of my life on you guys! Goodbye Croatia, you were beautiful but I’m not ready for a relationship right now, you’d understand if you knew those beautiful goddamned horses.