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Plitvace Lakes National Park is spectacular! This is a view from a high path we followed looking down on this section of the park.

Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia 2/15

There are so many beautiful places to see and experience in our world. We are so blessed to have the opportunity to see places we never dreamed of seeing or even knew about just a year ago. While visiting Plitvace Lakes National Park in Croatia, we walked for miles around the beautiful emerald green lakes and saw so many large and small waterfalls.  Sara tried to capture how amazing it was In short videos and photos – but it’s not as spectacular as seeing in person.

While the 2.5 hour bus ride to and then back again from the park was nothing to write about, the six hours we spent in Plitvice were just magical.  At the park we met and walked with one young woman from Netherlands and another woman from Australia.

This is the big waterfall. Although it's winter and the vegetation is brown, the golden hues were beautiful.
Just a few minutes walk from the entry, we see the beautiful emerald water. We will eventually be walking across the wooden boardwalk you see around the lake.

I am including some videos – hope they work for you.  If not and you want to see them, send me an email and I’ll forward the link.  I haven’t quite mastered how to best include videos in the blog yet.  The video below shows what we saw right after we entered the park.  We will meander our way down on that boardwalk and across the water towards the big waterfall. 

We start our walk down the hill and towards the big falls and lake
We walk across the boardwalks over the water and waterfalls
The water is so clear - you can see fish swimming below the ducks and the reflection of the clouds.

The video below was taken as I walk along the boardwalk towards the big waterfall.  

Little falls are all around us as we walk
We made it to the big waterfalls. It's really so much bigger than it looks from this photo.
We spent the day exploring with these young women. Chloe was from Australia and Jackie was from the Netherlands. We rode the bus together from Zagreb to Plitvace.

Named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979, this is a place of natural wonder.  In the summer, it would have been greener and more of the park would have been open.  In a normal winter it would have been beautifully covered in snow (the upper lakes are not available in winter).  Nevertheless, it was still lovely with the clear blue waters running swiftly and the walkways mercifully free from crowds of tourists. It would have been beautiful at other times of the year, but leafless trees gave us better views as we walked.  And, the unseasonably warm, sunny weather provided a gorgeous day to be out in nature.

From the big waterfalls, we will continue around the lake on the boardwalk.  It’s all so breathtakingly beautiful.

We walk along this boardwalk - from the waterfalls to the larger lakes would take us from the right to the left. The next photo is taken as we walk up the steps that are in the left side of this photo.
We walk up the boardwalk along (and over) the water. The sound of the water as it rolls over the rocks is quite loud in some areas and so soothing in others.
As we reach the top of the steps, we are at another part of the lake. We continue to walk along the lake.
I loved walkng along the lake on the boardwalk
Eventually we reach the lake you see at the top of this photo. We stop for coffee and hot chocolate while waiting for the ferry to take us across the lake. Once on the other side, we climb up along the edges to return to the place we started. Our walk took us in a loop around the lakes and waterfalls in the lower part of the park.

As we climb up to the top of the hills, we have beautiful views. The next photos and some of the previous photos were taken looking down on the water, boardwalks and falls we walked on the other side.

This is the same photo that I started with - but it's so beautiful I had to put it here again. I took it as we walked a ridge looking down on the areas we had previously walked.
I took this photo in the late afternoon -the light is so different from a similar photo (up next) that was taken from close to the same spot in the morning.
This photo was taken in the morning. It's taken from about the same spot as the previous photo , similar angle - but the light s so different