Sunday, June 29, 2008

13 Days in Croatia

Some friends were staying on one of the Islands for two weeks in a hotel comlete with breakfast and dinner. They asked us to join them so we decided to take the camper down. Turned out we were right next to their hotel in a tiny camp ground. The island is Uglian and so is the town. We went to Croatia for a very short trip a few weeks ago so we had some idea. But this island was much more simple shall we say. The great thing about these islands is that there are so many places to swim and very few people. The water is clear, clean and warm enough. It seems Croatia is making a huge effort to stimulate it's tourist business. Construction is going on everywhere, improvements to streets, boardwalks, and town squares.

We spent 10 days on the island with our friends something longer than we planned, because the kids were all playing together and things just went well. Then we moved on to see the cascading lakes at Plitvecka Jezera. They are a series of lakes each one a bit lower than the other so they are connected by waterfalls. Very beautiful, and quite a tourist attraction. A little like going to Yosemite. It's all very organized, we did the six hour tour, you take a bus down to the highest lake, then walk for an hour and a half or so, eventually arriving at one lake where you are taken on a boat across it. At that point there is a nice park with food service, we stuffed ourselves with roasted chicken.

What really made this a vacation was all the little problems, you know what's a vacation without them. The first couple of days on the island it rained a lot, the only hot water was solar so no hot showers, we were able to use the camper shower, but there was no water connection so I couldn't refill our tank. Eventually I bought some extra tubing and disconnected the camp shower hose to hook up my hose. It worked fine. Did I mention that there was only one other family in the camp. In fact when they arrived to stay in a trailer fixed in the camp they were just behind us so I decide to move, and that's when I backed into the tree, smashing a tail light. Next came the mountain bike ride in which I lost our camera going over some really rough rocky roads. Hours of back tracking failed to find it. We did have another camera but of course I didn't bring the charger for it as I hadn't really planned on using it. The final episode was the dead battery when we went to leave, our friend and the neighbor helped us jump start it. That was fine, I kept the motor going on the ferry ride, but when we stopped on the island of Pag for a little tour, dead battery again. I manged to jump it using the camper battery, but that requires taking out the driver seat to access it. Not much fun.

More later

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