Zadar, Croatia – 235 km

Hope there is no bus coming!

Late start this morning (9:30 am) because we had to time a ferry sailing to Split, Croatia so we started our morning with a walk along the sea wall in front of the hotel.

We took the scenic route to the ferry over the mountains through the lavender fields (sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?). The road was narrow (what else is new) and a bit rough but almost traffic-less so a great way to start the day. We aren’t sure when the lavender beds were established but the entire hillside has rocks piled

Lavender fields

in rows, supposedly to keep the soil from blowing away. This is not harvest time so all we could see was the green – no flowers and no lovely lavender aroma.

We arrived at the ferry terminal in plenty of time for one of the guides to buy food for an onboard picnic. The loading procedure was interesting as the bikes were directed down a steep, narrow corrugated metal ramp onto a bottom deck. It looked like the bike riders were not going to make it as it was such a small opening into this “hatch”.  We then proceeded upstairs to have a picnic lunch of bread, cheese and meat which P2 cut up with his large knife. Later, Norma was fascinating to the little guy in the window on the ferry!

We arrived in Split, Croatia about 2 hours later then extricated the bikes from the hold and entered bedlam. It was a scene that reminded me of the scary street scenes in India with traffic snarled, cars, busses and trucks pushing their way through the pedestrians, who in turn were running in front of the vehicles. Unbelievable. Norma wisely walked on/off the ferry and missed the hold and the street scene. After about 20 minutes we managed to split Split (thank goodness) and proceeded north toward Zadar. All this traffic is proving to be the down side of this vacation but luckily once we got out of town it cleared and the traffic flow improved.

At one photo spot along the way there was a family selling their home grown cherries. We bought some and Doug gave the little boy a Canadian flag pin.  We left to a chorus of Kanada, Kanada! They were really excited – big smiles and waves to us as we rode away.

The three single riders went off on their own heading to the hotel and we three couples set our pace with Tomaz. We did make a very nice coffee stop near Sibenik before making our way to Zadar.

Split

Cherry Seller

We are in a very lovely hotel. From the descriptions we are getting from the others we have the biggest and nicest room. It is huge and very comfortable after the last two nights.

We all piled into taxis and headed to the old town for dinner. After a walking tour of the old town we headed for dinner in a very nice outdoors restaurant. After dinner more walking to view the solar light show and hear the water pipes. You can look this up on u-tube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBhk5KFwLVc. It is pretty impressive.