October 17, 2015

Doing Dubrovnik

We have a 10:00 pick up this morning which would make it seem like we have a lot of time, but any job will expand to fill the amount of time allotted.  We do have plenty of time to get our acts together, fix a little breakfast, get packed up and be ready to go when Antonia knocks on our door to settle the bill.  We chat for a while (did we mention she is chatty?), pay up and lug our suitcases down the three flights and three blocks to the closest car park area.  There we meet Tomo our driver for today.  Tomo is a strapping young fellow, an athletic 6’3” but we’re more interested in his nice big BMW.

Hugs with Antonia, John and Tomo in the front and the Princess in the back and we’re off. We’ve heard the drive described as one of the ten best in the world.  We conclude that may be a bit of a stretch but it is scenic with an ever-changing landscape.  John is happy to be sight-seeing rather than driving.  There are mountains all the way and a big-time downpour early in the trip. We wouldn’t know how to behave without some rain in our lives.  Between peaks is a fertile flat valley that is lined for many miles with oranges, tangerines, olives, grapes and other sundry plant products and hundreds of little stands selling fresh fruits and veggies.  There are also a couple small commercial operations that look like they might be distribution companies moving crops to bigger markets.  There is no way they can sell it all from these stands.

John and Tomo chat away in the front seat while Mary becomes an expert in eastern Adriatic geography.  Tomo was a professional water polo player signing his first contract at age 15 and moving quickly to Croatia’s first division.  OK, we know what you’re thinking.  First division water polo?  Look up Croatia’s Olympic water polo results and it might make more sense.  He retired a year ago at the age of 25.  He said 8 hours a day in the pool or gym, 7 days a week for 10 months a year for ten years will wear you down.  Anyway he is a pleasant guy with good Croatian stories and he is kind enough to make a couple stops for photos along the way.

About halfway to Dubrovnik we have a 10 km stretch of the highway that passes through Bosnia-Herzegovina.  When they divied up Yugoslavia after the war here, apparently B-H wanted a piece of sea access and this is it.  We pass through customs on one end and then do it again 10 minutes later re-entering Croatia.  Check another country off our to-do list.  Too bad they didn’t stamp the passports.  Coming out of the continuing mountains down into Dubrovnik is pretty spectacular.  This city sits back in a little bay and while not as big as Split, apparently has a long history as a sea power.

Tomo knows his ropes whipping around the harbor area and never misses a beat pulling right up to our hotel.  We were probably a pretty undemanding fare for him with few stops, no bathroom breaks and no meal breaks.  We would have overpaid for this 3-1/2 hour trip if this was all, but of course he now has to drive all the way back empty with another set of tolls and many liters of petrol.  No, we’re not going to mention how much this little splurge costs, but if we had two really good seats for a Wild game….

Out hotel here is the Kazbek and it’s pretty fancy.  It was a deal on Expedia.com with good TripAdvisor ratings.  This is the end of their season and the hotel actually closes after next weekend so that explains the fancy rate.  For once we’re not in the “old city” but rather on a peninsula near the ship harbor.  Our hostess, “Jenny,” gives us the Dubrovnik spiel with maps and transportation info.  She also directs us up the street to a little spot for lunch – a little pizza and salad washed down with a beer.

We’ve been cooped up until now and we need to stretch out a little bit.  There is a pedestrian walkway around our peninsula and we think we can walk the whole thing.  The path starts through tropical foliage pretty well populated with restaurants, bars and fancy hotels.  This is certainly unlike anything we have seen in Croatia so far reminding us of upscale parts of Florida or California.  This isn’t necessarily why you would come to Europe but after almost 6 weeks of old stuff it feels pretty good to us.  The extended path now follows a ledge along the water which will be on our left as we circle clockwise.  There are fewer hospitality stops now and a bit more nature.  The whole thing turns out to be about 4-1/2 miles which is enough stretching out.

It is warm with blue skies.  Time to grab our kindles and hang out at the pool for a while.  That’s correct, a pool and even more interesting, we have an elevator.  We’re in the lap of luxury.  After our usual late afternoon break we choose to eat at the hotel restaurant.  We are the only ones there when we arrive so we also enjoy private dining.  This gives us a chance to chat with our server and compare notes about the seasonality of our businesses.  She and her husband take a couple months off starting in 10 days and then they start to get their game faces back on for a March start up.

The chef is maintaining his game.  We get a complimentary anchovy salad appetizer and a decanted bottle of Croatian red.  John has a sautéed bream sitting on top squid ink polenta which is sitting on top of a nice marinara sauce.  Mary has grilled tuna with grilled vegetables and we get an extra side of veggies to maintain our great health.  Bummer, someone else has come in for dinner—so much for private dining.  The food is excellent.

After dinner we take one more stroll along the harbor enjoying a beautiful night.  Into the old city tomorrow and away from West Palm Beach.

What did we learn today?  Mary has always been right that the ultimate luxury is to have a car and driver.

October 16,2015

Sunny Split

Can we believe it?  It’s 60-degrees with bright blue skies this morning as we look out our window at the harbor and sea beyond.  Nothing will spoil this rare perfect weather day.  Wait, what’s that on the horizon?  It’s a monster cruise ship pulling into “our” town.  Oh no, there’s another one.  So Crystal and Norwegian cruise lines have conspired to dump another 5000 touristos into our midst this morning just as we finally escape the rain.  Oh well, everybody has to be someplace.

We enjoy our balcony views as we get ready for the day and linger over a coffee.  It is gorgeous. Our conundrum this morning is how we’re going to get to Dubrovnik tomorrow and we have been procrastinating about this decision.  Do we rent a car for one of the most spectacular drives in the world with the ability to stop wherever we want?  Or do we take a bus for somewhat less money and look out the window?  One is tense but exciting, the other is relaxed and hum-drum.  So we opt for the splurge and get a car/driver to take us the 3-4 hours along the mountain roads.  He will stop wherever we want and take as long as we like.  He will pick us up at our apartment here and drop us off at our hotel in Dubrovnik.  (This is us trying to justify the extravagance.)  Mary says to John, “happy birthday.”  Antonia makes the arrangements with a fellow she knows and problem resolved.  The stock market was up two days in a row which gives us another avenue of justification.

We start with the same route as yesterday down the hill and through the fish market.  More vendors today and a lot more tourists.  You would think vendors would increase with the number of customers but we can’t believe that the cruise ships folks will be buying a lot of squid.  It is back into the palace and we finish with any Rick Steves recommendations that we might be interested in and then mill around the rest of the inner part of the city.

There is a nice park outside of the palace wall with interesting sculptures, and a little sort-of shopping mall that we explore.  The nature of town has certainly changed today with our 5000 new friends and we conservatively estimate that they will collectively drop at least a quarter million bucks into the local economy today.  We see a couple Minnesota sweatshirts and one Lakeville t-shirt—don’t know if it was north or south.  Eventually we wind our way back to the Riva after exhausting the remaining palace sights.

Mary has today’s plan for lunch.  She had spotted a place this morning that sold a sort of rolled up pizza thing about the size of a wrap and we’re going to find it and have a picnic on a Riva bench.  After almost retreating to our apartment to retrace our steps we finally found the right spot.  We get two and then go to the grocery for 2 cans of beer, find a bench in the shade looking at the water and our lives are perfect.  We were going to trade our pizza-wrap things back and forth but decide the chicken and the tuna both taste the same.  That’s good for neither.  We spend a lazy hour nibbling, sipping and people watching.  It’s probably 70-degrees with perfectly blue skies which is a perfectly fine activity for right now.

When we finally get moving again we checkout the ship harbor moving past all of the local ferries and on to our new cruise ship neighbors.  The terminal is a bee-hive of activity with all the comings and goings.  The view from here of the Split waterfront is lovely—sort of like Nice, France—and we can imagine it to be very welcoming to new arrivals.

We’re just killing time at this point trying to extend the day without really anything left on our list to accomplish.  We look for streets we haven’t walked, stop at the post office for a stamp and then wander outside of the old town up a street past “our” neighborhood.  Eventually we find our way back into our little warren of streets, get into our place, open all our floor to ceiling windows and grab books to get us to sunset.

Dinner tonight is at Bajamonti Restaurant on the top of the square Trg Republike.  It is a huge outdoor venue.  With our cruise ship brothers and sisters back on board and heading out to sea the place is almost empty with just a couple tourists and some locals.  It is pricier than our little neighborhood joints of the last few nights but we have a great location looking down the square to the water.  Mary has a salmon with grilled polenta and John has a sautéed sea bass with a chard and new potato stack.  We have been spoiled by our Eastern European portions and prices which makes tonight’s dinners seem a little precious, but still very good.

This is our last shot at the Riva stroll and there are more people around tonight.  The promenade cafes are busier and there is more life.  With the clear skies the temps have dropped pretty quickly and while it is cool it is a lot better than cold and wet.  It is well after 10:00 by the time we get back, and with a need to get up in the morning we go straight to bed.

What did we learn today? That we have become immune to rambunctious children in public places.  It bothered us a lot on our trip to St. Petersburg but now we barely notice after 5 weeks of indoctrination.

October 15, 2015

 

 

Ancient Streets

Some stuff about Split.  It is a couple thousand years old, first settled by the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Venetians, then the Ottomans, then the Austrians and then about a century of confusion before becoming a real independent Croatian city.  It is the second largest city in Croatia after Zagreb with a population of about 200,000, a little smaller than St. Paul, and is located on the east side of the Adriatic Sea across from the boot of Italy.  The Roman emperor in the fourth century, Diocletian, was a local boy and built himself a retirement home in Split when he wasn’t emperoring in Rome.  The Diocletian Palace still dominates Split’s harbor area and many of the original palace walls and structures remain.  In the area inside the walls and immediately outside are still many of the original buildings and the “streets” are 8-foot wide cobblestone paths that wind and wrap around the hillside going up from the Harbor, many ending in the doorway of someone’s home.

Our plan today is to be Split experts and take in as much as we can.  There are a few breakfast supplies for a DIY start to the day.  It is still overcast and not pleasant looking outside but it has stopped raining for the moment.  Antonia appears on the stairway as we are leaving and we chat for quite a while. 

Her husband rushed to sign up for the tactical response team of the police when the war of 1991 broke out and saw sporadic fighting.  She told us that outside of some air raid warnings and one shelling from the Yugoslav navy, Split escaped direct involvement in the war.  Indirectly, however, everyone was affected as fighting was within 40 km of the city and almost everyone had family involved.  Her husband was eventually injured clearing land mines five years after the end of the war and has been suffering from PTSD since.  He remains in treatment as doctors try to balance brain chemicals with prescribed chemicals.  Very sad but she seems to be fighting her way through it.

We have the Rick Steves walking tour in our pocket when we twirl down the hill to the fish market. There are not a lot of vendors here but the ones that are are working pretty hard to move their catch.  We’re not ocean fish experts but can identify some eels, flounders, squid, octopus and lots of little fish we assume are anchovies and/or sardines. Probably some sea bass and we think we heard someone say bream as well.

Moving inside the castle walls we pass through café lined squares into the Peristyle.  This is where Diocletian allowed his subjects to kneel before him and on a lucky day, kiss the hem of his robes.  We pass into the Entry Vestibule that reminds us of the Parthenon in Rome with the round hole in the ceiling.  There is a group of Klapa singers (traditional male Dalmation folk singers) in fancy dress hanging out to perform for passing groups and the acoustics of the round stone structure are impressive. We catch a couple tunes, pass on the CD offer and move along.

The Cathedral of St. Dominus is right behind the Peristyle which began its life as the mausoleum for Diocletian.  Since he was personally responsible for the death of a few thousand Christians in his time it is fitting that this church sits on top of his body. We continue to move east to the green market.  This is right out the “Silver Gate” and today has a sampling of produce and junk—not a threat to the market in Zagreb.

We keep moving away from the Palace into some little neighborhoods on the side farthest away from where we are staying but don’t see a lot of promise.  We return to stroll the Riva, the harborside promenade.  The Palace walls form one side and the harbor the other with a palm tree and café lined pedestrian parkway in the middle. The gelato looks magnificent but something more substantial for lunch is probably in order.  The weather is still borderline but we tough out an outdoor table for a shrimp pizza and beers at Adriana.  The relative lack of tourists makes us grateful we are here in the shoulder season. 

We walk off lunch with a long walk around the harbor checking out the big boy boats.  The walkway around the marina is pretty new and embedded with engraved plaques listing all of Croatia’s Olympic medal winners.  We recognize a couple basketball and tennis players.  We continue exploring the old streets inside and out of the palace walls with an eye towards finding a restaurant for dinner.  No luck there but we just had lunch a couple hours ago.  It isn’t just about the food—or is it?  We have done as much exploring as we need for today and have a couple chores for upcoming travel arrangements so go back to the apartment for work and naps.

Still not much relief from the crappy weather.  It is chilly and damp as we look for Konoba Varos, tonight’s dinner spot.  It’s pretty close to the place from last night, and while not as jovial it still feels very local.  We get a fresh anchovy, olive and onion plate with a basket of bread to start along with a bottle of cheap red wine.  Mary has a smoked salmon fettucine that is very rich and buttery and addictive.  John has the grilled squid with a side of grilled vegetables.  The squid is a little chewy but with a great grilled flavor.  Mary stops at the rest room on the way out and John strikes up a conversation with a local guy outside.  It’s Ted, so we spend about a half hour getting the “Ted Talk” which is a history of Split for the last 2000 years.  Ted is really a pretty interesting fellow and a rare English speaking older Croatian, but Mary’s eyes are rolling back in her head and John excuses us to move along.  Good night Ted.

After dinner we take one more pass at the night time Riva paseo but once again we are pretty lonely out here.  There is a balcony bar about halfway down that is pretty raucous but that’s the only action.  We are getting better at finding our apartment and are tucked in pretty quickly just before the next storm.  Our laundry is finished and has reappeared.  We don’t even have to fold before repacking.  Nice.

What did we learn today?  Before people had power tools or heavy equipment they could build things that would last a couple thousand years.

October 14, 2015

Splitsville

This is Wednesday morning and if our arithmetic and calendar skills are functional this means that we have now been on the road for five weeks, exactly the halfway point of our trip.  We are continuing our “follow the sun” itinerary as we move consistently south.  Sun, Hah! That’s a good one.  It’s a dreary foggy morning and we’re awake early.  We debated hanging out around here for a while this morning but it is so gloomy we decide to keep moving.

We kiss our sweet room goodbye after loading up on the breakfast buffet and back the VW up to the hotel lobby door.  It is pouring out now and we’re already wet by the time we get bags loaded and situated.  It is about 230km to Split, our destination for the day, a 3+ hour drive which should get us in about 12:30.  We drive past the park entrance and see tour groups huddled under plastic ponchos with more busses arriving.  We’re thankful for our 4 hours of decent weather on our visit yesterday.

The first hour and a half of the drive we slide up and down pretty substantial mountains and then across expansive valleys in between.  It is sort of Pennsylvania-ish.  We’re in and out of rain the whole way with some of the storms carrying a lot of wind and rain.  We are going south most of the way and approach the coast at Zadar.  We have moved from our friend of yesterday, the D-1, now onto super toll road A-1.  The mountains are more dense and we pass through several tunnels, one five miles long, that get us through to the flat coastal plain.  We get glimpses of water from time to time but we aren’t close enough to the Adriatic to see the big water.

We have relied on our rental Garmin GPS this morning since it seems to get the big picture and can find major highways.  It also seems to have a pretty good feel for the location of the rental car office in Split so we give Sami the day off.  Until we need her.  The Garmin directs us to a supermarket distribution center in the middle of an industrial park about 20 km from Split and announces that we have arrived at our destination. Crap.

There will be hell to pay but we pull out the phone and beg Sami to come to the rescue.  She tells us that we have 28 minutes to go and weaves us through some pretty tricky areas, and then along the waterfront and stops us right in front of the Sixt office.  The car checks out OK and the desk guy gets us started walking in the right direction to find our new home.  We are still using Sami to navigate the tiny little streets 750 steps to Zephyrus where we’ll stay for 3 nights. 

Antonia, our Aussie/Croatian hostess shows us to our one-bedroom apartment which is delightful with great city and harbor views.  She is very chatty.  We ask about a self-serve laundry and she offers to just go ahead and do it.  When she asks about daily housekeeping Mary offers to swap no-housekeeping for the laundry.  A bargain struck.

By the time we get unpacked and get the laundry sorted it is pouring rain outside.  Make it stop.  It is also really windy making an umbrella useless so we hunker down yet again.  This will turn out to be the laziest day of the trip but at least we got from one port in a storm to another.

Our tiny little twisting streets through ancient buildings remind us of Rome or Venice without the canals. We have a target in mind for dinner tonight but the challenge will be to get there in the semi-dark.  After a couple of dead ends in the generally right direction Mary spots the “Sperun” sign and we’re in.  This is a little family run joint and they are clearing a table as we arrive which leaves us at the door watching the action.  A couple waiters are bustling around with one guy at the bar and a lot of jovial shouting back and forth.  We like the scene.

We order a liter of house white wine and a sardine/tomato bruschetta.  Mary opts for the tortellini Bolognese and John has the whole sautéed sea bass with greens and potatoes. Both dishes are really good and we pass back and forth.

The thing to do at night in Split is to walk the “Riva,” the promenade along the harbor.  We give it a shot into 30 mph winds and spitting rain and wonder why we are the only people out there.  There is lightning all around us with an occasional boom of thunder.  Time to give up for today and live to fight again.

What did we learn today?  Housekeeping for laundry? Pretty much everything is negotiable.