A Good Road Ahead.

My route through cars, Croatia, and figuring out what life’s all about. 

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It’s 11:40 on a Thursday, and I’m sitting at home in my pyjamas, browsing LinkedIn and other places for jobs that fit my skillset: a journalist and content writer with almost a decade of experience in esports, gaming and tech. Surprisingly, to no one but perhaps me, losing my main gig late last year did not translate into a string of fantastic rom-com-like events where someone reaches out and gives me a great job just because I have tons of experience. An entirely different thing happened: I had no luck, and were it not for my main client, I’d be in deep shit now. 

As a man of many hobbies and interests, I’m looking over my desk, which is filled with bits and pieces of watchmaking, my most recent obsession, and a soldering iron I bought to change the pickups on a Telecaster electric guitar. It’s a mess, and not in a good way.

Writing has always been natural to me, and writing about things I like is perhaps even more difficult than writing for a client or a press release. Those always come easily, perhaps too quickly in some cases, and articles like this one don’t.

But rambling will get us nowhere, so let’s start being serious.

Who am I? 

My name’s Ivan, I’m 33 and live in Čepin, a village close to Osijek, in Croatia. I graduated with a Media and Cultural Studies degree in Osijek, and then got a job in Croatia’s finest tech media outlet, Netokracija, where I spent the next 5 years. During that time, I’ve met dozens of people, done hundreds of interviews and long-form articles and found my style and voice, which is, as ChatGPT describes it, “laid-back but fact-focused”.

I wrote about startups, digital entrepreneurs, apps, mergers and acquisitions, but nothing made me as happy as when I had the chance to write anything about cars. A review of a then-new Cupra Formentor is still one of my favourite pieces of work.

After leaving Netokracija, I joined Esports Insider, where I stayed for three years, and am now working freelance and trying to make something memorable. 

Being raised in a family of four, where my father did not drive, my mom always shuttled us around. Still, she was never that much into cars, except for her obsession with Mercedes-Benz, especially the W202 series of sedans she always called “Genscher”, inspired by German Chancellor Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who was in office in the early 90s.

A quick search would point out that Genscher was reserved for the more premium offerings from the German brand, notably the S-class of the day, but that made no difference to my mom – a Genscher was an old-school C-class for her. 

This blog is a form of therapy, a dream, and a way of figuring out how to create. Thanks for joining me on the ride.

Throughout my childhood and early adulthood, we never had interesting cars. My earliest memories were of a Zastava 128 in a mustard colour that leaked water so much that my parents decided to sell it immediately after one rain-soaked incident on an Istrian holiday in the late 90s. My family then acquired a Fiat Marea, and would tell the story about how that’s the only thing available at post-war Osijek. That was not entirely true, because in the same dealership, an Alfa Romeo 156 was also on sale, and my parents thought that the Fiat was the better car (probably because of the Yugoslav mindset and all those Zastavas and Fićo’s).

This was the first in the line of questionable vehicles for my family, which we’ll talk about someday. But the defining moment of my car-loving childhood was the visit from our family, when they came to Croatia with a black convertible BMW 3-series, better known as the e30 or “kockica” (cube) as we call it in the Balkans. 

I remember standing outside in the sun for a full hour, admiring the car and its unusual graphics and wheels, and having no courage to ask my mom’s cousin to let me sit in it. It later turned out to be not just a regular E30 but a real Alpina B3 2.7 Cabrio. As years passed, I asked my mom and her cousins about it, but they sold it quickly after that—I would’ve died to have it, even in a garage somewhere. 

I guess that’s where my love for cars came from. Since I was never from a car-loving family, I did not get the chances most of us get when they have a dad whose friends have at least an interest in cars, but seeing that BMW in person is forever etched in my memory.

Why a blog

So, that brings me to this blog. I’ve always admired cars and wanted to write about them so much that I tried to find gigs in the car media or some other form of writing, but to no avail. In Croatia in particular, car websites are not very good, and most of the content is tied to either the big news websites where you have to write about politics and other things in addition to cars, or a couple of TV shows that praise every single vehicle because that’s the only way they can stay afloat.

That led me to think of ways to incorporate cars into something someone might read. Adding the fact that Croatia is a tourist destination to the mix, I thought, why not tourism and cars? 

This led me to the idea you’re reading about now: a website about interesting roads, routes and trips in Croatia focused on cars and driving. It’s not TripAdvisor or some other travel website. Still, it has a straightforward premise: if you find yourself in Croatia with a cool car, you can visit the website and find an interesting route with a cool story to back it up.

That’s mostly it; I’m not interested in flashy spots, fancy hotels, top speed runs or anything like that – I’m interested in a good road that you could drive with just about any car, have fun and drive it with a smile on your face. 

Hope this translates well into this blog,
Ivan