Thurs, 23 June 2016, 11:24 am: Having departed the village of Jezerce, we’ve driven through part of Plitvice Lakes National Park and are driving north toward the city of Karlovac, which within a few minutes of shooting this video we’ll pass through. Beyond that to the northeast is Croatia’s capital city of Zagreb. A street sign you’ll see in the video indicates this and also points to the east for the cities of Sisak and Vojnic.
This :52 second piece is certainly not a 2016 Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Short, but I’m sharing it because it shows you the key elements of quintessentially rural Croatia: serene stretches of grass and hills, abandoned or neglected buildings, paved but narrow roads, and a distinct lack of tourists.
As this clip’s primary soundtrack you hear some (presumably) Croatian rock music on our car radio. I got excited at the rental car’s USB port below the radio controls, since I’d brought a thumb drive loaded with my preferred driving music, but the system regrettably refused to read my drive. I plugged it in repeatedly (believe me, I didn’t want to give up) but it never worked. I therefore spent a bulk of our on-the-road time on an occupation just as important as dogearing relevant pages in guidebooks: scanning in-range radio stations for tunes that didn’t suck. And that’s not a knock on Croatian musicians; at least half of the songs I vetoed were by American artists I cross the ocean to avoid. I’m so spoiled back home by my satellite radio with signal that never weakens; you don’t have to lose the second half of “Love My Way” to static and garble and a Spanish detergent commercial bleeding in. I am totally out of practice at scanning the entire FM band every ten minutes, listening for four seconds at every two decimal points on the dial.