Zagreb; Tuesday, 29 July, 2014

Breakfast completed it was time to check out and head over to the bus station. I walked the short distance to the tram stop to catch the tram two stops round to the station. I’d purchased a couple of tickets the previous day so already had one to validate. The first validator failed to work and it was only a nagging thought at the back of my mind about the way one of the other passengers was observing people validating tickets that I decided to try a validator slightly further down the tram, which did work.

Halfway towards the next stop the person I had suspicions about stood up, flashed his ID badge and with another couple of colleagues did a full ticket check of the tram, catching out a couple of other tourists who clearly hadn’t bothered trying more than one validator.

Whilst they were being given a talking to on the platform at the bus station stop I walked over loaded my luggage into the coach and headed out of town to the airport.

On checking in I was upgraded to business, which I thought was going to be great, until they said there wasn’t a lounge for domestic customers and instead I had to sit in the tiny and very humid gate room (not even a café or a working vending machine!) with everyone else.

We boarded on time but for some reason the plane just sat there for about 15 minutes without moving, until two really noisy jet fighters shot down the runway and took off beside us, at which point we were allowed to start our take-off roll

50 minutes late we touched down in Dubrovnik and 30 minutes after that I’d recovered my luggage, handed it back over to another airline and was sat in the considerably more pleasant than Zagreb departures lounge waiting for a flight into the unknown…