Its been rather hot of late, any of unfortunate enough to have talked with me on the dog n bone will be familiar with my moaning about the sun and how I’ve been hiding inside snuggled up to my little fan. Not so last weekend when we were visited by a Zagrebian friend -Sunch- who had never been to the Petra Gora monument before and so off we went. Our secondary mission was to record the positions and condition of the local Partisan, anti fascist war memorials.
We stopped off at a couple we “found” on the way and failed to find the one we went looking for which alledgedly is a stone round table and bench in the woods not far from here, but where exactly! We will return either with our elderly neighbour who has been there in the past or wait till winter when the undergrowth has receeded. We adventurously drove up to Petra Gora monument by a small road we hadn’t done before that gradually crumbled into a track before our eyes. Sunch, our guest, was suitably impressed by the crazy architecture and the 360 view from its top over the surrounding forests.
We heading down the main road towards the hunting lodge that does fruit filled pancakes with icecream (not vegan) that the unconscientous say are very good. The road down twists and turns through the woods with plenty of streams running alongside . As we descended the road began to be more and more covered with debris and stones, that became logs and rocks before eventually the road had crumbled and caved in. After some discussion, I drove across the damage and then slowly down the rest of the destroyed road. The storm we had two weeks ago was obviously a lot worse there than it was for us!
A change of plan saw us leaving the Partisan hospital and printers for Sunch’s next visit and instead we headed for Barilović castle which is next to the river Kupa! Turned out the Castle is closed whilst it is being renovated or maybe waiting for the next civil war to destroy it completely! Either way the castle is only 10 minutes drive from the “beach” on the Kupa at Donji Velemerić , our local swiming spot! I’d had enough of the heat and driving around in it and decided I’d swim from the castle down river and meet the others at the beach. after an hour of swimming in at times rather too shallow for comfort water I began to wonder how much further it could be! I saw a gazillion dragon flies up close, a couple of suprised riverside barbecuers in the middle of nowhere, a load of small brown fish that seemed to be attacking me! and a stupid heron that kept seeing me and flying on ahead of me for 50 metres again and again! But most startling was the signs of recent flooding with trees, logs and debris lodged high up on the bank and in trees along the way some so high twas hard to believe they hadn’t been put there by some prankster!
We had more visitors today in the form of council inspectors come to check the facilities we willbe offering to paying guests! More on that soon, but suffice to say we are nearing the end of a long bureacratic road and so Barabrith B&B will soon be advertised on Happy Cow.