Beauty and the Beard:
Bound to Wander

We woke up this morning still tired from yesterday's climbing. Today was our day to try out some deep water soloing. For the non-climbers out there, that's rock climbing with no rope above deep water. When you're ready to get down, you jump. If you're slip, you fall into the water. It's pretty straight forward, but it's not without it's dangers. We had been warned of people breaking their backs by hitting the water wrong, and large chunks of rock blowing off the side of the cliff. But this is something we've wanted to try for a long time. Watching the deep water soloing in the movie King Lines was one of the things that inspired Aaron to climb in the first place. Of course early in the morning, the thought of canceling sounded pretty appealing, but no! It was finally happening. We ate some breakfast and packed our gear. It was about a 20 minute walk to our meeting point. We walked up to a small sail boat and met our 3 guides. About 5 minutes later, one...

Day 25 was our day to get stuff done. We explored the city a bit more, and gathered information for the next few days. The only truly blog-worthy thing that happened was another awkward dining situation. We sat down at an outdoor table of a restaurant that was way too expensive for us. Some of the plates were over $100 USD. We tried to save some face (and money) by just ordering some wine and cheese. It didn't really save us anything. The meal was over $20, and the waiter was judging us pretty hard core. But we ate our expensive cheese with dignity, paid our bill, and promptly ran away to find a much cheaper restaurant. We also felt bad about not having pictures from the beach in the previous post, so we went back for some photos. The next day, we dragged ourselves out of bed to meet our rock climbing guide at 9. It doesn't sound like an early start, but trying to make sure we had everything for our trip was hectic. We didn't know if we had to hike to ou...

The old town in split is unlike any place we've been before. It's basically re-purposed ancient ruins right on the coast. It's a jumble of shops, restaurants, museums, and homes stacked on top of each other. You could walk right off the edge of a cobblestone street, and fall 5 feet down to an outdoor table of a restaurant. The streets are much narrower than we've seen, and the city layout is a bit more like a labyrinth. But the people are extremely helpful, and very kind. The first thing we decided to do this morning was check out this old Roman palace called the Diocletian Palace. It was a retirement home for an emperor, built around 300 A.D. It turned out to be like a minute from our Hostel. It wasn't that impressive. We knew what we were looking for, and as soon as we saw it we said "Oh! I guess this is it. Wait... Is this it? Yeah. I guess this is it." We noticed several Roman Centurions standing around, and a large crowd started to gather around a p...

So its been three days since our last post. Sorry about that. Days 23 & 24 were pretty uneventful. Kaylea was not feeling well most of the time, so we didn't do much beyond going out to eat. We tried checking out a ruin pub (a popular style of bar in Budapest), but we couldn't find our first pick and the second was just a skeevy looking night club. We opted for another wine-night-in. Sunday we actually got a little bit accomplished. We ate a very late lunch for breakfast and then nailed down our trip to Croatia. After that it was more of Kaylea being sick. We decided to get a few groceries since our train rides to Split wouldn't have food. Unfortunately, all shops bigger than 200 square meters are closed on Sundays in Budapest. We settled for croissants from a bakery and more Pringles and Oreos from a convenience store. We also bought a loaf of bread from the convenience store, but later trashed it when we realized how bad it was. After dinner we walked down to the ri...