Hvar, Croatia – Rest Day

Hvar Harbour

This morning started with a walk along the seawall back to town. Beautiful harbour views along the way. Our objective was to climb the hill above town to the old fortress which saved the inhabitants of Hvar from the invading Turks. The trek up the hill started with a steady climb up too many stairs to count. It was very interesting as the narrow stair paths are cut up the hill through shops, bars, private residences before you reach a zig zag dirt path through gardens and on up to the fortress. This provided a lot of exercise and proved to be a very interesting site containing exhibits of materials found in old shipwrecks (samovars,

The Fortress

etc.), a prison, cannons, etc.  Norma managed to do some gift shopping there after we had a cold drink. We then descended back to the town square which was already beginning to get busy, warm and humid.

Hvar is a very popular destination for tourists. We met some young people from Texas who were “just over for the weekend from school in Paris”. We suspect it is very crowded during the summer months.

This afternoon we rode 60 km return to a

From the top

cottage winery with the California couple and Tomaz, a guide, for a tour, snacks and wine tasting. We were the only people there. The lady provided an excellent description of their business. She served us home grown olives and olive oil with lovely fresh bread and a wonderful cheese. We tasted four different wines, two white, one red and a dessert wine. It was a lovely setting basically in their back yard, not like the wineries at home where the tasting takes place at the actual orchard.

Incidentally, we can track how many times our

Town Square

blog is accessed on the internet and where the access is coming from. Turn out we are getting almost as many hits from Russia as we are getting from Canada! I suspect that is because this area is such a popular place for Russian vacationers and their search engines are bringing us up.

For dinner this evening we had a seafoodish dinner at one of the recommended restaurants. Excellent!

Tomorrow is a riding day to Zadar, Croatia and involves a 2 hr. ferry ride.

Wine Celler

Winery