Advertisement
Published: August 2nd 2013
Edit Blog Post
Wednesday July 31 – Another early day indeed. We were up at 5:30, and not super quiet for our roommates. Not quite payback, because I wasn’t that loud, but it was nice to not worry too much about being quiet since they weren’t worried last night. We were waiting for our 6:30 bus back to the main bus station by 6:15, but the bus did not come until 6:45. I was a little worried about missing our 7am bus to Split, but it worked out fine. Croatia is quite a long skinny country, so it takes a while to get from place to place. We got to Split around 10:25 and the guy whose apartment we rented picked us up and drove us around for an hour to get us acquainted with the area. My sense of direction is notoriously bad, so it really did not help at all, but it was a nice gesture. Once we were settled in we left to get a sandwich at a shop he recommended, but we could not find it. So then we tried to find the old town and got a sandwich somewhere else along the way. From where we are staying to
the old town is not that far, and yet we had trouble working out the walk there. It’s just a weird place. When we got there, we started out walking down the promenade, called the Riva. Along here, we found the entrance to Diocletian’s palace. It is a Roman ruin that is still in use today as the main site of the old town. It was built as a retirement palace for Diocletian around 300 AD. And it is still in use!!! Tons of shops and restaurants are still there. It’s very cool. After walking around here for while, we went to the bus station and bought our bus tickets to Dubrovnik for Saturday. Next up was the beach and swimming, followed by mussel risotto for dinner. We stopped at the grocery store for some breakfast foods and snacks for later. Then we were done for the night.
August 1 - see Trogir
Friday August 2 – Tina and I talked yesterday about what we would do today. Our first plan involved taking a boat to an island. Everyone comes to Croatia to island hop. It is THE thing to do. But I just couldn’t get that excited
about it. I have been to many islands, and they are pretty and great, but I just couldn’t believe I would get much more from an island than from just staying here. So we decided that instead of sitting on a boat for two hours each way, we would just sleep in and go to the beach here and relax. But instead of the beach we’d been to, we would go to the one on a peninsula with a large park on it. After breakfast we got ready and then went to the sandwich shop and picked up sandwiches for lunch. Then we started our walk over. It seemed pretty clear on the map, but then again, the map isn’t that great. The walk to beach took much more time than we expected, as we got to the park and then followed a path that seemed to lead towards stairs down towards the beach, but this was not the case. Instead we were quite high up, walking in the hot sun, sweating, literally surrounded by cacti and other desert plants. Crazy. Luckily we found a path down through the surrounding pine trees that did lead us in the right direction.
At the beach we found shade under a tree and set up camp. We swam, ate lunch, read, and slept until about 5pm. Tina went to lay in the sun at one point and someone moved into her spot, so she was laying somewhere else. Then another family crowded in on me from the other side. It was kind of weird – no personal space. I got a bit annoyed with a kid dripping water on me and looked at Tina. She was under a tree by herself, so I moved to join her. The beach was a rocky beach and a little hurty to lay on. People were also lying down on the big flat rocks near the water itself. We went in the water one more time and then sat in the sun to dry. From there we headed to another restaurant for dinner. We chose another pizza restaurant which we had read about as being the best here. It did turn out much better than the one from yesterday. Tina ordered a pizza with sausage and it ended up as cut up hot dog, which was pretty funny. But my bacon pizza was quite good. After dinner
we got some ice cream, which was ok but not the best I’ve had. From there we went back to the sandwich shop and got sandwiches for breakfast (!), dropped off our stuff at the apartment, and then back out to see how to get to the bus station in the morning. We asked a woman at the nearby bus station if there was a bus to the main bus station, and her English was not that good. But she flagged down a younger girl who helped us and walked us over to a different place where the bus left from. I’m so glad we did that, or we would never know what to do at 5:30 tomorrow morning.
Tonight I found out my cousin is here in Croatia, and in the town I am going to tomorrow. But tomorrow he leaves to go island hopping. Such a bummer. It would have been great to see him.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.067s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 12; qc: 29; dbt: 0.0354s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb