Scenic snowy train journey to Varaždin, Croatia

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(the article below accompanies this video)

This months-long trip suddenly turned mystical today – and you’ll agree, if you are a snow-worshiper like me. Masayo and I had planned yesterday to find transportation from Osijek in eastern Croatia up to the northern town of Varaždin because snow was forecast there. Hey, we came to Europe in winter; we want to see snow. Today we’d get more than we bargained for.

My blood sugar was excited too, but in a good way: all day long it was quite reasonable, generally, until a pasta dinner gave me the only ultra-high reading of the day. Better one understandable bad reading than a string of mysterious ones.

When we woke up in our room at Sobe Lišnić in Osijek, which has been clear and sunny the last couple of days, there was snow covering the lone skylight in the room. My heart jumped in excitement, and we threw on just enough clothes to not die of exposure and ran outside.

Thick snow was covering everything outside; it was cold and cloudy and big flakes were still falling. I checked my BG in the snow and it was 72. I’ve perhaps not had a more perfect start to a day on this trip yet.

We sat in the dining area for our second and final Osijek breakfast, which was the standard varied buffet, all laid out just for us as nobody else was staying here as far as I can tell. Today the owner gave us a special treat: a piece of exclusive local Slavonian sausage (Slavonia being the name of this region of Croatia). It was salty and a neat bonus for our meal and our stay at Sobe Lišnić.

I even peeled my eyes off of the snow falling outside the large window long enough to eat the sausage and the other stuff from the buffet. We didn’t sneak any sandwiches for lunch this time.

Unnerving trip to Osijek station

Our day’s plans were vague at best: I’d made a room booking in the town of Varaždin, which we could reach by train. But there was only one train per day so we still had to get to the station in Osijek in time. The snow would make walking there take way too long so we’d have to take trams. But we hadn’t take any tram in Osijek yet and didn’t know the system. Plus, we hadn’t actually bought tickets for Varaždin yet so we needed extra time to do that. If anything went wrong we’d be stuck in snowy Osijek another night.

The guy at our guesthouse told us which tram to take and we walked outside. People were shoveling sidewalks; the snow was still falling hard. The trams were indeed pushing through the storm as pedestrians walked with umbrellas to ward off the falling flakes. Others (like us) were just letting it fall on their heads and clothes. Anything more than a few meters away faded into murky white.

We stopped by a Konzum supermarket and a Mlinar bakery (there are about a thousand of these in Osijek) for snacks on the train and got on what I hoped was the correct tram. The fare was 10 kuna each, about $1.50.

The tram, on which several people rode, each looking expectantly and nervously outside, wound lazily around curves and between large smooth piles of snow in some residential parts of Osijek that we’d not seen. There was a strong, palpable feeling of excited energy in the air though I didn’t know how much I was merely projecting my own excitement.

At each stop, the tram would shudder to a halt and the doors would open; some would steel themselves and step out into the blizzard while others, cold and wet, would exhale noisily as they stepped on board, shaking snow off their lower legs and grabbing something for support as the tram started up again.

After a while I started to wonder where the train station was; I tried to ask the driver but couldn’t make him quite understand. A nearby passenger who spoke English stepped in and told us to get off and “go right”, and that it would take about five minutes.

At the next stop we got off and went right, which meant walking through snow that was nearly up to our knees to parts unknown. I wasn’t quite sure where we were headed and could feel the day slipping away. But then we came upon another tram stop, and a tram was just arriving. This one should take us to the station; we ran and hopped on in the nick of time, ourselves now laughing and shaking off the cold and snow into puddles on the floor.

The station came in two stops and we got off with enough time. If we’d missed that tram we wouldn’t have made it. Again, the travel gods smiled upon us. (Except that we paid the fare all over again on the second tram, after which Masayo noticed that our first tickets would still have been good for transfers of up to 45 minutes. A waste of $3! Curses.)

We bought our tickets for Varaždin and went and sat on the modern, comfortable train. We watched plows moving back and forth outside the station, pushing great piles of snow here and there in a valiant effort to make train access easier. I could barely make out the name of the station through the big but quiet storm outside the train window.

Train through the storm

But we left Osijek station as planned, and we were soon moving through the amazing snowy countryside. I took a break from staring with wide-eyed, childlike wonder at every field, house, and car we’d pass in the dense whiteness to check my BG and was 198. A bit high, but in this atmosphere I scarcely cared. I took a shot and had my cinnamon roll with sparkling water.

At a station called Koprivnica we had to change to a smaller, local train – I guess Varaždin isn’t a super-popular destination even for locals. This new train was much simpler, older, and more rickety. We’d be on it for about an hour.

One thing the train did have was a heater – turned up way too high. The snow outside was still gorgeous and thrilling but Masayo and I sat in the old brown upholstered seats and sweated in the absurdly stuffy air inside. By the time we reached Varaždin we were positively wilting.

Snowy and twilit Varaždin

It was dusk in Varaždin and the snow was still coming down hard. We walked down ethereal sidewalks through deep drifts about 1 kilometer to Garestin Pansion, a hotel I reserved a room at through booking.com last night. This was a big square but low building, more like a proper hotel than most of the places we’ve been staying. There was an attic-like angle to the ceiling on our second-floor digs and I promptly hit my head on the edge of it. It left a big painful lump.

Welcome to beautiful Varaždin!

But all the excitement of the day hadn’t made me high; once checked in my blood sugar was an excellent 81.

Having reached Varaždin we decided to work out the second part of our ingenious plan – to go see the obscure but amazing castle in Trakošćan, a nearby town up in the mountains just south of the Slovenian border. The bus station is near Garestin Pansion and we walked in the snow which fell hard and stung our eyes as we walked through the dark streets, some of which had no sidewalks and made us trudge along the slushy roadside.

The internet was very vague about transportation to Trakošćan so visiting the station in Varaždin was the only way we could confirm it. I like that about travel, when it happens: sometimes you have to earn your adventures by doing the work yourself.

At the bus station there were timetables that seemed to indicate that there were a few services a day to our destination. Were they operating as usual here in the holiday season? We’ll just have to come and find out tomorrow morning.

Italian food kills blood sugar

Dinner was back at our hotel in their restaurant, a friendly and wide open area that was a little quiet on this night. I ordered a plate of gnocchi, which I’m not too familiar with except that the last couple times I’ve had it I got very high afterwards. It’s tough to calculate Humalog for, but I did my best, injecting into my leg at the table through my sturdy Bluff Works travel pants.

Back up in the room the day ended on a couple of sour notes: at 9:00 pm my BG was a gnocchi-caused 315, and the Atlanta Falcons’ season ended. It was the last game of the regular season, against the Carolina Panthers. If we won, we’d be in the postseason and if we lost that was it. We did terribly; I streamed the game on the very reliable NFL Game Pass and watched the year come to an ignominious close.

The room was nice enough, if small, but our heater wasn’t working. I went down and told them at the front desk and someone came to fix it pretty quickly. The guy spent a long time working on the heater, and when he left it was working… a little better, but not quite perfectly yet. But on a snowy day it’s natural to feel a little cold, right?

But those things didn’t ruin the day by any stretch of the imagination: the snowy wonderland we had seen and felt in Croatia was a definite high point of the trip so far, at least for me. And tomorrow everything should still be covered in deep smooth snow – and if the local bus service proves reliable we should be visiting a fascinating hilltop castle far away from all civilization.

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