Croatia. Land of turquoise waters and rocky beaches, medieval walls and Roman ruins, towering mountains and majestic waterfalls. It truly is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.

We spent about 2 weeks in the region this past May, traveling with our good friends Phillip & Billy for part of the time, then continuing on our own for the rest.

The majority of our major international trips so far have been focused on just one or two big cities: Paris & Barcelona, Lisbon & Porto, Tokyo & Kyoto. But the nature of Croatia lends itself to a slightly different style of trip, mainly because the charm of the place is less in the cities and more in the small towns and the stunning landscapes between them. Even the bigger cities of Zagreb and Split aren’t the kind of cities you’d spend 5 or 7 days in, at least not without a car and a good number of day trips planned.

With that in mind, we divided our 11 nights in Croatia into 5 main destinations. (Technically we were gone for 14 nights, but the first two and the last nights were in Vienna, more of a long layover than anything, so I’ll exclude those nights from our general itinerary). This took a surprising amount of thought and planning on our part, and a lot more work finding accommodations in 5 different locations, but ultimately allowed for us to see a good bit of the country and make the most of our time there.

With so many different locations, each worthy of its own post, I figured I’d break up my documentation for this trip into multiple short posts rather than overload you with one giant photo dump (3500+ photos, oh boy!)

I thought I’d start with a general overview into our 12 day/11 night Croatia itinerary, why we chose to stay where and break it up the way we did. I’ll follow this post in the coming months with individual posts for each of the places we stayed, including restaurant and activity recommendations at that time. I’m hoping this format will prove the most helpful when it comes time to plan your own Croatia trip (which is hopefully very soon!)

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