December days are done.

We survived another year! Amazingly we had guests come and stay for 4 days this month. Asao and Sumi came all the way from Tokyo to shiver their way to sleep in our rudimentary wooden house. They were stoic beyond any level I have ever witnessed and claimed to have enjoyed themsleves. lets wait and see how many stars they give us on Happy Cow !!

Here sit (left to right) Sanja, yours truly, Asao and Sumi in a Somobor cafe. Our honoured winter guests came all the way from Tokyo and put up with us and the weather for three and a half days straight! (Please ignore the fashion faux pas on Sanja and my part and under no circumstances should you assume that I am wearing a Christmas jumper! Never! That is infact my beloved Denis the Menace jumper and nice and warm it is too!

It got really could towards the end of the month but there were a few bright sunny days too but as yet not enough snow to warrant dragging the sledges out of storage.

I do love some of the sunsets we get here.

It is now a regular thing that whenever we go for a walk around the valley and pass by Slatko’s is that his new dog follows us all the way back to the village. When he gets close to all our neighbours barking hounds he stops, says good bye and heads back home – a 10 minute walk. Here Sumi and Asao have finally lost their fear of the big dog and start smiling and even petting him.

Asao , gingerly looks out from the top of the Petra Gora monumnet over the clouds of mist below. It felt a bit like being in a steam punk space ship flying above the clouds!

The plitvica National Park (75km down the road from us) is wonderfully devoid of tourists in winter time. Sadly when it snows they “close” most of the paths for our “safety”. This runs counter to the usual Balkan attitude of mostly letting us take our own risks rather than mollycoddling us. So we broke the rules and took a closed pathway back around a lakeside proving that even the Japanese can be led astray by renegade rebels of a certain age persuading them “it’ll be ok”! As you can see the snowy path was not exactly impassable let alone risky. The lake was beautiful and the sun shone on us for most of the way. Sadly my organisational skills had failed to check what time the Plitvica restaurant that does vegan burgers closed (3pm!!) and so we didn’t get to try them out, next time.

We intended to pop down to Belgrade for a few days, catch a gig, do some DIY and the like. The gods of traffic jams and the idiotic Croatian authorities (cops and border guards) had other ideas! What usually takes approx 5 hours to complete took almost 14 hours. I was behind the wheel all that time. With two BlaBla passengers in the back and an increasingly pissed off Sanja in the front. It was the journey from hell for 2024. This shot taken in a long stationary queue of traffic on the E75 motorway is rather pretty as well as triggering!

We had an extra day with Asao and Sumi – they came back for more!!! So we took them to Shambala for food and then off to Somobor to see the castle.

Sanja spends sometime deciding whether or not she can be bothered to bring the recliner back inside after a spell on it reading in the winter sun.

Our Monkey’s Arse tree (aka Medlar, but that’s not so much fun) seems to be doing nicely even in December!

Toodle pip, See you next year!