A Better Plan????

I believe I have conjured up a better alternative to getting a train at 2:30 in the morning! Well, at least I think it's a better plan :)

So after much research and banging my head against a wall, or so it seemed, I came up with this plan...Rent a car!

My original thought was to rent a car in Bled, Slovenia where the tours. My plan was to pick up a rental car the last night of the group tour so CL and I could get an early start the next day and drive to Split to catch the fast catamaran to Hvar at 5pm. You can imagine my shock when I started pricing car rentals and the cheapest one came back at $517! We only wanted the car for one day, but since we would be renting in one country and dropping off in another there was a monumental drop off charge...300 Euros!

Hmmmmm...what to do now? Well, if we could get into Croatia to rent a car maybe the prices would be cheaper. But I didn't want to miss the last night of the group tour. So then my brain goes into over-drive thinking through how this can be done, but I know it can be done and not for $500!

After going over the various scenarios in my head here is the plan I came up with and CL agreed...Thank God she is so easy going!

We will take the 5:20am train from Bled to Zagreb, Croatia's capital. It's approximately a 3 hour train ride. We get to the main train station in downtown Zagreb at about 8:30am, this is on a Tuesday. I found there is an Avis rental car desk at the Sheraton Hotel Zagreb which is only a few blocks from the train station so we can walk there easily pulling our wheely-bags behind us. This worked out perfectly because even though we will only need to rent the car for a few hours the cost is about $100. Now you are probably wondering why don't they take the train all the way to Split. Well....it's because the train will not get us there in time for the last fast catamaran at 5pm, and by driving once we get out of Zagreb the A-1 Highway is a brand new, straight shot from Zagreb to Split. And I have from a reliable source the drive from Zagreb to Split on the A-1 is about 3 hours with good traffic conditions. So in my mind I have told myself it should take about 4 hours, because I have giving us 1 hour to negoiate getting out of downtown and onto the highway. And since we are going to drop off the car at the Split airport which is outside the city, the drive may be a little shorter. Once we drop off the car we just hop on the city bus that will take us directly to the ferry terminal!

Now, I know this sounds like a lot of changes in modes of transportation. But even with the train ticket to Zagreb, the car rental, the gas, the tolls, the bus to the ferry terminal and the catamaran, the cost of that is less then renting a car in Bled and about the same amount as a direct train ticket from Bled to Split.

Even though we will be spending an entire day "in transit" we will be getting to Hvar in the early evening and that was my goal for that day. Then we have 3 days to bum around Hvar! :)

All is well in the world of Croatia travel planning! :)