How did I get here?

So how did I get here?

In a very circuitous way, actually. It began on my seventh day hiking through Hungary along the Iron Curtain Trail. I had begun the European Peace Walk in Vienna. For the next seven days i hiked 25km a day along the Hungarian boarder. On day number seven  I stopped dead in my tracks and did a 180 degree turn. Nope, I wasn't going to walk another foot (meter here) of the 28km hike of the day on the flat, blazing hot, mosquito infected path only to spend the night at another soviet era gymnasium with showers and plumbing also from the soviet era. Nope, that was it.  I backtracked and found the taxi guy who was ferrying backpacks for the ten others in my group who didn't want to carry 20lbs for 28km in 95degree heat.

I asked him to take me to the nearest train station.

I'd go anywhere.

The train in Koseg only went to Szombathely. Fine, I said.  I caught a train from there to Sopron. In Sopron I decided on Ljubljana, Slovenia (I'd heard it was beautiful). But thirty minutes later the lady from the information desk found me in the waiting area and said for a euro more i could go to Zagreb and then I wouldn't have an eight hour layover in another town I couldn't pronounce.  Okay, I said, Zagreb it is. Croatia has always felt like a second home to me. It would be my fourth visit to this lovely country. In a way I was still making up for the one of the biggest mistakes I've made in my life when I bagged out of a semester abroad on the Yugoslavian study group in college.

Two interesting women sat in the compartment I chose for my eight hour train ride.  As the ticket guy was shooing me out of first class seven minutes later the women mentioned over their split of champagne that they were on their way to a yoga retreat on the Croatian island of Hvar.  I typed the name of it into my iphone and bid farewell to first class.

There was one room left at the retreat when I emailed them the next morning from my bunk bed at the hostel in Zagreb. I'm on my way, I wrote. An eight hour bus to Split and twenty minutes to make the connection to the ferry to Hvar (I think it was meant to be) and by 8pm I arrived with the thunder and lightening that was as excited as i was to be in Hvar....one of the ten most beautiful islands in the world according to some magazine.

And so here i am. George Ezra has joined me.  I listened to his cd somewhere between one and two thousand times on the Camino in May and June.  And as i sit at my cafe by the water late into the night he is serenading me from the speakers above. It's good to be back with an old friend.