#get those pagos shoes now before everyone wants them

[elizabethrobertajones]

guys.... have you seen the glamour dresser expansion?

Anything that's in a set can be stored as a single item e.g. entire quest reward sets.

Unrelated, if you threw out 1 or more parts of Tataru's various attempts to dress us up to make space because you'd never need them and only kept a pair of boots and gloves, you can buy them back at a calamity salvager to make a full set.

[scandinaviacroatiaengbergs]

Friday and Saturday: More Zadar

On Friday morning, I woke up with a bit of a sore throat, but I think that was attributable to the air conditioning unit in the bedroom that we’re sleeping in. Sometimes refrigerated air units, like in a hotel room, make it so that I wake up with a sore throat. So, I did sleep in a bit, to see if I could shake that off. Eric got the kids all ready to go to the beach and they took off to the sun, the sand, and the water. I followed after them by about an hour. I had some emails to catch up on and I just wanted to relax with my tea and some quiet, haha. Once I met up with them at the beach, Rowan was really busy making a sand tower and he worked on that periodically throughout much of the day. Cece is really interested in making her “mud mix”: she wades a little ways out in the water and she bring buckets of water back to where she’s set up shop. She fills her little sand molds with her “mud mix,” when it’s just the perfect consistency, as if she's working on a recipe. In fact, Eric and I were served a variety of “cookies” that were made out of this magical mud mix. During the morning at the beach Friday, we visited with the Austrians a bit more and they brought our kids tropical juices twice during the day, because they are staying at the all-inclusive resort just over the hedge and could just pop over there and get them!  Our kids were sooooo grateful to them for that and slurped those drinks down in like 30 seconds flat.  They never consume anything so quickly.  So, the Austrians are a family of four, with the two kids -- little boys-- and the mom, Eva, is pregnant with a third, a little girl due in November. They live in Graz, and Eva had studied in the U.S., in New Jersey, during a year of college, and her sister actually studied in Albuquerque! Eva even said that she noticed that the way we said “water” was a telltale sign of being from New Mexico, which we thought was an interesting remark! In the mid-morning, the kids and I walked down around the coast to another little part of the beach where there was another little ice cream and hamburger restaurant there, which Rowan strongly affirmed that he was going to eat at, and he pointed out what he wanted to get on their menu, which was a calamari and french fry meal, and I asked him if he knew what calamari was, and he said it actually didn’t matter if he liked that or not because he was really just interested in the french fries. We went back to the apartment for lunch and the kids played inside for a little while (with the pattern blocks Rowan’s teacher Ms. Ellington gave him last Fall and he still loves to play with, and Cece does too). I made them both lay down for a little bit, but I wasn't intending on making Cece actually have a nap but she did fall asleep, at which point I took Rowan back to the beach and Eric stayed back at the apartment and rested while she slept. He said it was very hard to get her to wake up and she was very angry about being woken up, but at that point it was about 4:30, and that was really pretty late to still be sleeping. Once they did get to the beach, Cece laid on my lap for another good 15 minutes before she felt perky enough to go play with her mud mix again and then go swimming with me and then Daddy. We hung out with the Austrians a little bit more and then it was about 7 p.m. and we went to the restaurant we ate at on the first night, right adjacent to the beach. We had pretty much the same meal again, but this time, we switched up the salads just a bit (Rowan ordered a caprese salad for himself) and I ordered the kids a Pago strawberry juice drink, and they were in heaven with that.  It was really delicious. So, in sum, Friday was a pretty uneventful day, mostly spent at the beach. Now it’s Saturday and it was forecast to be periodically rainy and cloudy, and right now, as I am sitting at the beach, it is actually sprinkling on me and the clouds are dark blue, full of rain, but the kids are still happily playing away at the seaside, collecting rocks and making big towers, which thy are also caking with sand. It’s a pretty elaborate process. We spent the morning in the Old Town and it was cloudy when we got there, so it didn’t feel quite so hot and didn’t have the intense humidity quality of feeling like we were baking on bricks as we were making our way through the narrow, stone streets. The clouds eventually cleared, and then, alas, it was pretty hot again. We went to the open air market and bought 1kg of cherries (since, big tears!, we missed the cherry harvest of my parents’ tree this year, with this trip!!).  We also bought the kids each a pastry (Cece: apricot; Rowan: apple) and I actually bought a pair of shoes, so everyone won :) We spent about 3 hours in Old Town and Eric and Rowan actually got into the water near the Sea Organ, partially to investigate how it worked and made sound, but they weren't able to conclude exactly how it worked, other than that there are cavities in the wall under the water that the current of the water pushes up against, making sound that emits out of air holes up on the sidewalk part, which you can peek into, which many kids were doing. There is a video in the link above, so it will make more sense. It definitely made an interesting sound! Rowan and Eric also looked against the wall down under the water as they were swimming to check out the muscles and sea urchins and some fish; they had a pretty good time and were glad to have a respite from the heat in the cool blue water for a little while. Cece did not want to go in, as it turned out, though she said for a while that she did. After the swimming spell and sea-organ-listening experience, we eventually made our way back to our car and drove back to the part of Zadar where our Airbnb is; we parked, took some things up to the apartment, I took a couple Tylenol because my scapula is still killing me, and we went to a very late lunch, at about 3 p.m. We walked a little bit around the road just in front of the beach where we have been spending our time, and just a few buildings down the road, across from the marina, there is a really nice restaurant that we checked out today for this late lunch; I can’t remember the name right now and can’t find it on the map!  Now, this restaurant is not quite the kind of place we usually take two kiddos for lunch – or even to dinner, or us to dinner, haha—but it was so good and we were starving, and my mood would’ve fallen apart had we not eaten soon.  So, we sat on the second floor that looked right out over the boats in the marina – so many of them! The food was so delicious and Eric and I sampled a traditional Croatian liqueur, maraschino cherry, and the kids split a risotto with zucchini and shrimp, and I got some Romanian gnocchi and grilled vegetables.  Eric got a salad with tuna and we also got a pizza that everyone shared.  We have leftovers that should hold us through dinner! It was a really nice atmosphere and I'm glad we got to spend some time at such a nicely appointed and delicious restaurant. Now we're spending a somewhat drizzly afternoon on the beach, and I'm not sure how long exactly we will last, given the weather. Tomorrow morning, we're leaving Zadar and driving to Plitvice Lakes National Park  and perhaps from there we will add on our visit to Badovinci in the late afternoon or evening, and if not then, we will do a day-trip from Zagreb on Monday. Badovinci is the town that my grandmother’s mother came from, and according to my cousin and his wife, there's nothing there anymore but the church and the graveyard, but we definitely are going to make a trip there. And then after our Monday in Zagreb, we fly to London on Tuesday. I can't believe the strip is winding down. It's amazing how quickly 3 weeks can pass by!

I will post pictures from today in a separate post!