one thing a day | 8 nights | from $2,280 per person
Istria Vacation Package, One Booked Thing A Day
This Istria vacation package puts one appointment into each day and leaves the rest of it alone. Eight nights, eight bookings, a car, and nobody deciding where you have lunch.
What one thing a day means here
Eight nights, two bases, eight bookings. Each day carries one appointment and nothing else. A truffle hunt in the oak woods above the Mirna valley. A fish market at first light. A boat along the coast to the offshore islands. A cellar on a gravel farm road where the tasting runs long. All eight are confirmed and paid before you land, and all eight are over before the afternoon is. What happens next is not planned, and we do not plan it for you. This Istria vacation package assumes you can find your own lunch.
- Hours already spoken for
- About three hours. Six of the eight bookings run two to four hours, the boat day runs six, and the departure day carries nothing.
- The earliest you must be somewhere
- 6:40 am, on two mornings only: the truffle hunt leaves at 6:40 and the fish market is finished by 9. Everything else on the trip starts at 10 or later.
- The longest stretch that is yours
- Forty-two hours. The boat ties up at 4 pm on day five and nothing is booked again until 10 am on day seven.
- Who chooses where you eat
- You do, apart from the two to four hours a day somebody else is running. No meals are reserved for you and no route between towns is set; you get a list of places and pick from it or ignore it.
- What happens if you skip a day
- Skip one and no money comes back. Each of the eight is paid in full to the person running it before you arrive, and they keep it whether you show up or not. The single exception is the boat, which can be moved to another day once if the wind is wrong.
- Who this shape of day does not suit
- Anyone who does not drive. The hill village, the cellars and the truffle woods sit 20 to 45 minutes apart on back roads with no useful bus, and a driver is not included at any price. It also suits nobody who wants the whole day accounted for: four or five hours a day here are blank on purpose, and if that reads as poor value, book a fuller shape instead.
The last row costs this company bookings and stays on the page anyway. A shape of day that does not suit you is far cheaper to find out about here than on the third morning.
What the per person figure pays for
- Eight nights in two places: five in a coastal town, three in a hill village, both with parking off the street.
- A car for all eight days, collected and returned at the airport, because nothing inland works without one.
- The eight bookings: truffle hunt (3 hours), a 6 hour boat day, two cellars, an olive press, a market walk with a cook, and a ridge walk above the coast.
- Breakfast every morning at both bases, plus dinner on the first and last nights.
- Entry fees and the harbor charge on the boat day.
- One printed sheet per day: where the thing starts, when it ends, where to park, and four places to eat nearby that we have no arrangement with.
What you pay for separately
- Flights into Croatia, priced on their own and not folded into the figure above. Figure $760 to $1,420 round trip per person from the East Coast, more in July.
- Lunch and six dinners. $35 to $55 per person per day covers both across most of the region.
- Gas, tolls and parking away from the two bases, around $130 over the eight days.
- Whatever you decide to do with the empty hours, from a beach chair to a second cellar.
- Travel insurance, which we neither sell nor arrange.
What it costs
from $2,280 per person
- Covering
- 8 nights, one booked appointment a day, the rest empty.
- Assuming
- Two people to a room, unless the six rows above say otherwise for your case.
- Pushed up by
- The month, the grade of room, how late you leave it, and how many of the hours you want somebody else to hold.
- Fixed when
- An operator puts it in writing with its own name on it. Until then it marks the bottom of a range that genuinely happened.
You settle with the operator, through whatever system they run. This site gathers nothing and no card ever arrives at this company.
Months that suit this and months that do not
May, early June, September and October. The sea is swimmable from mid June, the inland roads are empty, and the woods are at their best from early October when the white truffle season opens.
The second half of July and all of August are the weeks we would talk you out of. The coast runs at 90F, street parking becomes theoretical, and the boat day fills with other boats. The point of this shape is the empty afternoon, and in August the empty afternoon has nowhere to go.
November through March comes off the list too. Rain falls on 10 to 14 days a month, half the coastal kitchens close, and the boat does not run at all.
Still open when you confirm
Four things get settled at confirmation: which coastal town you sit in, which day the boat sits on and where it moves to if the wind turns, whether the sixth booking is a second cellar or the olive press, and whether the car is manual or automatic, which adds about $210 across the week.