As you probably don’t know yet: I was on holiday last week. Some of you might have noticed that I had gone a little quiet on the usual channels like facebook, twitter, irc and whatever though. The reason is that I decided to use this opportunity to go offline for a week, like completely.

That came in handy for quite some reasons. First off, I was in croatia, a foreign country and did not want to get a local sim for data. Second off, we were on a boat for a week and electronic devices and water don’t really like each other. Third off there were so many interesting people and things around that I would rather enjoy that and not stick to my phone all the time.

My holidays started with a little road trip from austria to croatia with a cute little fiat 500 (really nice car btw!). We drove down and made a few stops on the way (best meal of the whole week!) and saw a lot of the countryside. I can totally recommend travelling this way, it was so much fun. Good weather, the motorway, a little nice music and looking forward to your holidays made it an awesome trip!

We arrived in Split, from where our boat trip was going to start the next day, in the early evening and joined up with a part of the crew to have dinner and go celebrate.

This slowly leads up to the “weird” title of this blog post. Why did I name it piratebox you ask? Easy! It was a trip organized by HQ, former sandbox, you see what they did? Well, anyways. We had a total of ten people in the crew, of which eight were HQ members (I am not one of those btw). Of the ten, I knew only one other person, the rest I had never met before.

So I did not only get to know croatia and sailing but also eight new and really interesting people that I would really like come the end of the trip.

So the next morning we headed out to the boat and some time in the afternoon everything was finally ready and we could head out. Just minutes after we were out on the open sea one of the roughest storms of the year came down on us, which was kind of hard on us as six of us had not been sailing before. But after two hours of limited sights, water from all directions, strong winds, very few orientation, a few prayers, finding the life wests and trying them one, being punched in the face by rain, freezing in your wet clothes and trying not to sink, the storm finally passed on and we were still alive!

That night we had one of our best self-cooked meals ever, which was probably more due to the just survived storm than due to our cooking.

The next morning we attempted to leave split the second time and were a little more successful. After that the whole week was a bliss, we usually sailed a few hours through the croatian archipelago, took a lunch break in some laguna to go swimming, eat something and have a drink, sailed a few more hours, docked or moored at some port and had dinner, either ashore or on the boat.

Some nights we partied hard, some nights we went to bed early, but there was always lots of laughter, singing, exciting stories, lots of interesting discussions and never fighting, which made the whole thing even better. And some stuff that probably is best summarized as “what happens on the boat stays on the boat”.

Anyways, I can only recommend croatia, sailing and HQ people from the bottom of my heart. Probably one of the coolest and most interesting holidays I have ever had!