Plitvice Lakes National Park

What we most wanted to see in Croatia was the Plitvice Lakes National Park — a five-mile-long valley where a river becomes a series of sixteen lakes, one cascading into the next as the valley deepens into a gorge. All around are low mountains and deep forest that shelter all kinds of animals, some nearly impossible to find in the wild anywhere else in Europe. Click here for more information about the lakes, the park, and the history of both.

Coming by bus from Lovran was a day's easy journey. We stayed three nights so we’d have two full days to walk around and see as much as we wanted. Our guidebooks said vigorous hikers could see it all much faster, that one day or even half-day might be enough, but — as distinctly nonvigorous hikers — we knew we’d want more time.

One departure from the website's routine: we found many beautiful things to photograph, but few if any really needed captions. In the end, we decided to omit captions in the Plivice photo galleries and let the pictures speak for themselves.

The menu below lists the three days and nights of our journey to Plitvice and our stay there. To open an item, move the cursor onto it. (If it doesn’t open, move the cursor off and back on again.)