Croatia with Kids: Putting our 9 Rules for Summer Travel to the Test + a few amendments

Last year we spent 18 days traveling through Italy and Greece. An epic trip. When I looked through the photos I thought, these will feed my soul forever.

It was hard at times. It was transformational at others. It became our topic of conversation, the things we laughed about, the reference point for all future trips we dream about taking.

We were definitely doing it again.

As we moved from region to region I took note of what worked, what could’ve worked better, what I wished we’d done and what we did just right. Then I drafted our 9 Travel Rules to make planning the next trip easier.

When I started sketching out our trip to Croatia, those rules acted like guardrails to keep me from spinning out of control with all the possibilities.

While they eliminated some of the noise, planning a big trip requires immersing yourself in a ton of information and slowly weeding things out. And then going back to the discard list a few times just to make sure.

The hardest part was coming to terms with what we wouldn’t be able to see (Rule 1) if we wanted to keep our preferred cadence of three nights at each destination and our time under two weeks.

I choose Dubrovnik as our base because I wanted to spend a few nights in Montenegro (we ended up just doing a day trip – the right choice but if I did I again, I would skip it all together).

I started researching 6 months before our targeted departure date – and mostly I thought, this can’t be right.

Searching flights to Croatia left me feeling hopeless…

So expensive. Completely out of our budget. And travel time? On average 18 hours.

To make sure I didn’t have Tunnel Vision (Rule 7), I checked all options, even the more complicated ones (flying to Venice or Naples and taking a train to Ancona or Bari and then ferry to Dubrovnik or Split).

I obsessively checked Google Flights for all routes, plus or minus days, for months. January, February, March, April…

Meanwhile, I broke Rule 2.

Things were filling up, so I booked accommodations without airline tickets (all fully refundable by certain dates, which I added to the calendar so I could cancel if I had to).

I wish I could say it was easy to plan. I still obsessed over options, routes, hotels and ferries. There were times I wanted someone to do it for me (there is! ) or that anyone else in the family would help. But I also knew I might hate everyone else’s ideas…

In the end, the rules held up.

We spent the money, we booked private transfers (Rule 4), we had access to pool and sea at all times (Rule 3) and we were o.k. with only experiencing a small part of the country because we knew we would always go back (Rule 1).

That being said, I did have a few amendments:

1. Keep travel days to 3 hours to get the most out of your time in both your departure location and your arrival location.
   Check out at eleven and check in at 2…. try to keep your travel within these hours. If the only ferry leaves at 7 a.m., well there’s nothing you can do about that – but it will mean missing that amazing breakfast.

2. Always book places with breakfast included.
   Breakfast was key for our budget…breakfast at the hotel, snack and then a nice dinner out. Most places in Europe offer breakfast but check anyway. And also, that’s why no Airbnb.

3. Check satellite images for an honest look at the property and its surroundings.
   Some places were gorgeous. Then I’d go to street view and found it was surrounded by dirt roads and cinder block buildings. Not the vibe I wanted.