I got to go hiking up a peak near the mountain of Urljaj (try to say that three times fast!) in the interior of Zadar county which is in the middle of Croatia and about 170 miles (270 kilometers) southeast of Zagreb, the capital city where I normally stay. While out hiking, I saw a cow! A whole herd of them, about a dozen total. Just as I and the other hikers were heading back to our staging point, the cows started walking back to their pens, looking like they knew the way home too! The cows spend the day grazing along the mountain valleys and then head to enclosed pens at night that keep them safe from wolves and bears.
The view from the mountain that I hiked up was beautiful. You could see hundreds of miles in every direction; looking southwest I could see Croatia's coastal mountain range while turning east let me see into Bosnia, Croatia's eastern neighbor.
Even though it was a bit chilly this week and last week, two weeks ago it got up to 60 degrees. 60 degrees in the middle of December! That's very unusual weather here.
