Yes, you read that right! Ferries and travel fairies (we are now convinced they exist) played a large part in our success today! One almost catastrophe after another tried to mess with our plans, but somehow, each and every time, we escaped unscathed.

All we had to do today was drive from Kotor, Montenegro to Split, Croatia which is a 5-ish hour drive if all goes well. We have given ourselves 8 hours, just in case. Because, well, we have border crossings, construction, accident possibilities (we remember Berlin to Munich!!), car rental returns and ferry boarding. Lots of things can go wrong.

We had our fair share of stress:

1. Our car didn’t start this morning. Dead, dead, dead.
   • Solution: The car rental company met us with a brand new car, no hassle, no muss, no delays. Back on the road in plenty of time to still make our ferry. Thank you SixT! Only about an hour or so lost.
2. The weather went from bad to worse. Sheets of rain pouring down as well as construction delays.
   • Solution: Jason did an heroic job driving through the chaos and traffic was really tame. What could have been hours of delays only slowed us down a little bit. About an hour slower.
3. Finding the car rental return kiosk was next to impossible in the pitch black night and the pouring rain and we were losing time.
   • Solution: Once we found it hiding in a little parking lot that wasn’t lit up at all, the staff taking our car from us took less than 30 seconds to deal with everything. Any time we lost looking for the place was made up. Phew!
4. We typed in the wrong destination address for our Uber driver.
   • Solution: He very kindly double checked our ask. Did we really want to go to the cargo ferry terminal? Or did we actually want the passenger ferry terminal? Crap. We joked that there was no human trafficking happening and could he please take us to the correct place. He took care of everything on Uber’s accounting end and made it happen. About 15 minutes lost (but likely an hour or so gained??)

Thanks to the travel gods, the travel fairies, the travel whatevers, we are currently settled in at the bar with a beer and a glass of wine. Our bags are securely stowed in our room, we have space to spread out, we are still in range of an internet signal and all we have to do now is relax and let the captain take us to Ancona, Italy. We should be arriving there bright eyed and bushy tailed in twelve hours.

This is our very first time travelling by ferry (other than little crossings) so we are excited to have yet another new experience. Bon voyage!