Four Days Up the Coast of Croatia

The McDonald’s employee sees my littler sister and me sleeping on their red bench seat. She continues to sweep under our empty table, waking me up. It was hard to fall asleep anyway, what with the terrible Spanish music and cold draft in the Barcelona airport at 2 a.m. It’s just Chloe and me now, in transit overnight to Dubrovnik, Croatia where we will arrive without reservations—literally without lodging plans, but also without expectations of this southeastern European nation between the Balkans and the Adriatic Sea.

Ses Salines beach at the most southern tip of Ibiza is known by the rich, the beautiful and the famous. Walking along the shoreline it all appears pretentiously picturesque: yachts on the horizon, the inviting aqua clear waters, a sharp and jagged coastline of yellow cliffs, carved stones by the water’s edge. But when I look a little closer I find champagne corks in the sand, see a naked woman tanning next to her gold pumps and hear techno from the beach bars drowning out the waves.

Tomato Fight in Spain!

The world's largest tomato throwing festival takes place in the small Spanish town of Buñol, 45 minutes outside of Valencia, every year. It's called La Tomatina. And ever since I was a little girl I wanted to be in a food fight like the ones I saw in the movies. With only four hours of sleep since our last night in Madrid, the four of us travelers woke up at 5:45 a.m. to catch a metro and a train to Buñol. We had to make do with wine for breakfast and to no surprise, there were hundreds of people from around the world who also shared my dream of launching ripened red fruits.