Here’s our colleague John Pierce, from The Old Farmer’s Almanac, talking about this year’s edition on National Public Radio.

Last week, on the plane from London to Halifax, I got to talking with my seatmate, a woman studying social work in Norwich, England, and hoping to work in child protection. I proudly talked about the excellent Best Start program in my home province.

How sadly ironic, then, that our provincial government has decided not to honour its commitment to the program.

If you’re going to cut because of fiscal problems, would it not be wiser, from a purely practical perspective, to cut something other than a program that aims to:

…maximize the development of young children and their parents, in order to increase the children’s opportunities for success later in life.

Malaysia Airlines has a $99US return fare, Newark to Stockholm, Sweden. For two adults and a child, with taxes the combined fare is $617. That’s an awfully cheap way to get three people across the Atlantic and back. Thanks to the pointer from Jared Blank.

1997 Chevy Blazer 2 door, 4 wheel drive automatic. 119,500 kms, Vancouver driven until May 2004. Never seen winter. New tires, air conditioning, power: mirrors, windows, driver’s seat, locks. Class 3 Trailer hitch. Asking $12,000 or best offer. Call 902-367-2786 or email blazer@rukavina.net.

There are additional photos available.

We caught the overnight ferry in Split bound for Ancona, Italy. The ferry leaves at 9:00 p.m. and arrives at 7:00 a.m., and we had a cabin, so we didn’t get to experience much of “life on the sea.”

Ancona was my first taste of Italy, and I liked what I found. The city was characterized in many of the guidebooks I read in advance as bland and depressing; here’s what the Rough Guide says, for example:

Ancona is a depressing place, severely damaged by war and earthquakes, with a modern centre of bland broad avenues and palm-shaded piazzas. However, it’s the mid-Adriatic’s largest port, with regular ferries to Greece, and you may well pass through.

In contrast, I found the city pleasant, friendly, and well-equipped. The plazas and broad avenues were very interesting, especially the main street of down, which gets closed to traffic every night. We had one of the best meals of our trip in the Strabacco, and we bought gifts for people at home in several interesting shops downtown that were equal to any we’d seen elsewhere in Europe. This is, I fear, a common guidebook malady: if some place isn’t Rome or Athens, it’s called “depressing” and “bland.” It wasn’t.

I took photos of the ferry ride and of the city, including an shot of Different Strokes in Italian.

We flew to London by RyanAir, were overnight one night there, and then home to Canada the following day.

Our trip south from Gospic was somewhat comical. We headed out after lunch on Monday, taking the brand new expressway south, through the mountains (including a 6km long tunnel) to the seaside town of Sibenik. We arrived in the early evening, and spent an hour or so trying to locate a hotel. When we finally found the hotel, we realized that we’d left our passports at the hotel in Gospic.

So it was back out on the expressway, and north to Gospic at 130 km/h (the speed limit), where we ended up spending another night at the Hotel Ana.

Tuesday morning, we were back on the road early, bypassed Sibenik, and arrived in Split at 11:00 a.m., in time to return our rental car before the noon deadline.

As a result, we got to travel the new expressway, 6km tunnel and all, not once but three times.

Split is a large seaside city. The airport is to the north of the city, and it was there that we had to drop our car off, taking a cab down to the port where we would catch the ferry to Italy later in the day.

It was raining by the time we got downtown, but we still got a good opportunity to walk about the old city, and up the hill into a more residential area, with narrow cobblestoned streets and interesting architecture.

At the top of the hill, Dad suddenly recognized a staircase from our trip in 1972: it was the staircase to the Split Zoo. We walk up the (many, many) stairs, and at the top we found a barely-operating zoo, which had obviously suffered from the war, and from neglect. Animals appears to be getting fed, and the staff looked to be doing as much as they could, but the place was in very bad repair.

From the zoo it was a quick run downhill to an Internet cafe to deal with a server issue, a quick dinner, and then to the port to check in to our room on the overnight ferry to Italy.

Through all this, I took lots of photos as usual.

From Gospic we drove north to the village of Perusic, and the turned right and, a few miles down a one-lane paved pathway, found the village of Konsjko Brdo, where my grandfather was born in 1903.

In addition to photos of the villages, I also took a series of photos of Rukavina gravestones. This covers about 2/3 of the Rukavina graves in the Perusic cemetery. These photos will be of most interest, perhaps, to others doing Rukavina genealogy.

Our next major stop was the town of Gospic, which is the main administrative centre of the province of Lika. We were there as a base from which to explore the nearby towns of Perusic and Konjsko Brdo (where my grandfather was born in 1903).

Gospic, on the surface, was a bustling, vibrant town. It was hard to escape the fact that it had, a little more than a decade ago, been on the front lines of the war, though: around every corner was a building missing a front, or without a roof. Visiting the town’s museum, which itself suffered war damage, the curator said that although the physical damage of the war is being quickly erased, the psychological damage will take generations.

We were pleasantly surprised to find the brand new Hotel Ana, 5 minutes from the downtown. It was a modern, clean, well-equipped hotel with a very pleasant staff.

Over the course of the 24 hours in the area, I took a lot of photos of the city and its buildings.

Driving south from Plitvice, headed to the town of Gospic, we had the choice of going south, around the end of the mountains, which would have taken us far out of our way, or simply turning right and driving over the mountains. We turned right.

This took us over the Velebit mountains, along a series of switchbacks that took us up over winding mountain roads and down the other side. This area — barren and rugged — appears to have been along the frontlines of the last war, and we saw many destroyed houses, or houses without windows, and many empty villages.

Halfway along, and high on a hill, we came to the empty village of Bunic, with a church we later learned was destroyed in World War II. I took some photos of the church and the area around. A haunting place.

Driving further south, on our way to Gospic, we stopped for the afternoon at Plitvice Lakes National Park. Amazingly enough, we’d been there in 1972, but hadn’t actually gone inside the park, so had no notion of the wonders that lay inside. It was truly stunning: not quite on the scale of the Grand Canyon, but almost even more interesting because of the variety of water, plants and rock.

It was raining throughout most of our visit, but that didn’t stop us, and we stayed for a couple of hours more than we planned. Plenty of photos resulted. Some of these have had the iPhoto “Enhance” filter applied to them to sharpen and punch up, which is why you’ll notice some variation in the colouring.

If you are anywhere near Plitvice in your travels, it’s certainly worth a visit.