Border Crossings in the Balkan

One thing that the Euro zone has made us out of practice for is border crossings--I remember back in the early 1990's when we realized that we did not like Sewitzerland as much as we had hoped to and decided to drive from Geneva to Chamonix one day. There were several 'aha' moments along the way--the first was that the Swiss were perfectly willing to rent us any car we wanted, but they would not let us take a BMW to Italy--ok. We aren't going to Italy, but good to know. It must reflect something deep seeded about their cultural priorities, but just what it is escapes me. The second was that we kept seeing these signs that said 'Peage' after we had been in France a while. What can that mean, we wondered. While I was thumbing through the French phrasebooks, it suddenly became clear--it meant we had to pay a toll. Uh oh. All we had were Swiss francs. Thankfully, the credit card was an option, and we sailed through, but it was one of the last times that we had to deal with multiple currencies, until this trip.
So, within what used to be Yugolslavia, you have to cross borders between the newly established countires--they do not have a 'Slav Zone'. And in the case of the Serbs and the Croats, they hate each other. Slovenia is in the Euro zone, but the other two aren't and it hardly mattered to us, other than that we could spend Euros, since we were never in another Euro zone country. During our trip we made a total of seven border crossings betwen the three countries we visited--it is so easy to slip from one to the other in terms of how close they are, and that Croatia encircles Slovenia, and it was quite an experience--not to mention that it filled a couple of pages with passport stamps.
The good news is that if you are not a truck, the crossing is pretty painless. The wait is the only problem, and that usually took less than a half hour at each of the two checkpoints involved in a border crossing (trucks, on the other hand, had lines that looked to be kilometers long, and so crossing the border could take all day--my spouse thought they should have a guy who does the border crossing, but different people to bring it to and from the border. There would have to be several border crossers for every straight ahead truck driver, but such a wait could drive you crazy...unless waiting was your job).