My first solo trip was a super exciting experience, and I would love to do something like this once again in my life. How did I prepare for that trip? I booked a flight from Moscow to Venice, an accommodation in Venice for 3 days and a return flight from Budapest to Moscow in a couple of weeks. That’s it, nothing else. How crazy is that for the first solo trip? I was super excited from the moment I had this idea but the closer was the day the scarier this adventure seemed to me. I calmed myself down with the following idea: if things go bad, I will just spend the whole time in Venice and book a flight from Venice to Budapest to catch my plane to Moscow.
ITALY
But things didn’t go bad, on the contrary, they went amazing! My cowardish nature turned out to be pretty courageous when I was left on my own. I spent some time exploring beautiful Venice and then took a bus from Venice to an Italian city of Trieste. Trieste doesn’t seem to be very popular with tourists, but I had the most amazing time there, sightseeing, chilling at the beach and I even got to attend the Queen tribute concert in the medieval castle.
SLOVENIA
Then with another bus I moved to Slovenia to the town of Bled because it was my dream to see the Bled Lake. And I should say it exceeded all my expectations, the nature and energy of this place are just splendid.
After a few peaceful days on the lake shore, I took a bus to Ljubljana. It was my first visit to the capital of Slovenia, and I absolutely fell in love with this city. It is really a hidden gem of Europe. A huge Tivoli Park is located almost int the centre of the city. Five minutes after walking into the park a saw a roe! I don’t know any other European capital where this would be possible!
CROATIA
A few days after another bus took me to Zagreb. It was my second time in Zagreb but before I only saw it in winter, so to experience summer Zagreb was quite a pleasant episode of my trip. I got to see lots of things in the capital of Croatia, and also had time to visit some picturesque little towns. One of the most memorable events was a motorcycle ride to Medvedgrad, a medieval fortified town located on the slope of the mountain.
By the way Zagreb is the place where I started my travel sketchbook that you saw in the previous notes about Turkey and Germany.
HUNGARY
The last part of my trip was the most stressful as there was no train or bus connection between Zagreb and Budapest so had to go with a BlaBlaCar which turned out to be fun. I didn’t have much time to explore Budapest which was a pity because I love Budapest a lot, my first trip there was very inspiring.
As a final note let me show you some of my art that was inspired by this trip:
Each of the places I visited during this trip was very special and for sure deserves a separate article. Let me know in the comments which part of my trip would be more interesting for you to read about.