The Red Bag

It lands upon the beach, a sense of accomplishment is felt for it has made it to shore, now it seems is the time to rest.

The rest is quickly interrupted by the very same water that brought it to where it lay, bringing it back out to the mercy of the  waves.

Back and forth it now floats, being granted its temporary freedom, then having it taken away in the same stroke.

Where did it come from? Has it floated across from a neighbouring island or a passing boat? Perhaps it fell from a passing helicopter? Or maybe it was the fallen fruit from a nearby rubbish tree?

Does it even know where it came from? The answer to that one is no. It is just a red plastic carrier bag and is completely incapable of sentient thought.

This year when planning our summer holiday, we more or less realised there was no point pursuing the alternating year pattern we appeared to be following, never mind the troublesome trip to Syria next year and the subsequent biennial trips to various middle eastern countries, Italy it turns out is expensive.

So when planning this trip, we thought back over our recent summer holidays and which one was the favourite. On comparison, the favourite trip was probably Crete in 2011, so we thought, maybe we should return to Greece, but perhaps visit a different Greek Island this year, Corfu perhaps?

So this year our holiday was Biograd in Croatia.

Croatia would have fitted into our pattern, but what with the intermediate countries and the other half of the pattern, we weren't due to visit until 2018, so either we're 4 years early, or this year, we chose to travel to the future. Probably the 1st one.

Biograd is a small marine town on the coast of Croatia so there are plenty of boats and pebble beaches.

During our trip we chartered our own vessel to sail across the sea. Granted it did have pedals. In 2008, I rented a pedal boat with Titch to pedal around a river in Prague (I believe - Its too much effort to check). So what made this pedal boat superior? The answer is of course, a slide.

Not only were we able to pedal around in a boat and play in the sea with somewhere to keep our stuff but... we had a slide!

Weeeee!

Could we top the pedal boat during the same trip? Well we could try, but nothing beats a pedal boat, we visited a national park (called Plitvice or if you are misheard Cliff Richard)

Cliff Richard national park is a Unesco world heritage site full of lakes and waterfalls, it's really quite impressive. Its no pedal boat with slide, but its impressive in other ways.

Almost as impressive as the size of the burger we managed to get from a fast food place when everywhere else seemed to be closed.

Now that we've broken the pattern, its anyone’s guess where we're going next. Or if we assume we just skipped a few years, we can safely assume it's going to be Iran. I'm looking forward to it already.