Biggest Loser Former Yugoslavia

Today was a beautiful, exhausting Croatian day that ended with a bunch of very cute Croatian cats, amazing gelato, a cheese Burek, and a pretty sunset. Sounds idyllic doesn't it? You obviously haven't heard all of the details yet....

A friend of ours said that we should write a travel book, and we were thinking, well, who would buy our travel book? The 4 people in the world who want to travel like we do? So then we were trying to label how we travel...and figured that it is some kind of combination of the Amazing Race and the Biggest Loser (both TV shows that we haven't really seen because we don't have tv).

Here is how it would work: you have some insane path you have to cover in a certain period of time (for example, you might have to bike around the dirt trails of the hill towns of Istria on a partly working mountain bike to reach a beautiful ocean destination) and the last person to arrive at the final destination gets kicked off. A tourist-race to get in shape, lose weight, and lose more gelato.

You can imagine how this might lead into the story of our day. We woke up and Sue was giddy with excitement because we had decided to rent bikes and bike around today. Janna had trouble getting out of bed. To her credit though, once she did, she was smiley and happy and excited for her day of adventure. We took a morning walk through town to pick up some souvenirs, and then came back to our hotel for free breakfast! Eggs and yogurt and fruit and croissants and juice- delicious!   Even Sue had more than one mini-croissants.
We got all dressed for biking (which meant bathing suits under clothes) and packed our bags (which contained towels, 1st lunch, 2nd lunch, and two heavy books for reading), rented our bikes, and we were off. Following the "red" biking trail throught the countryside. Of course, here it should be noted that we were not following the trail in the conventional manner- that would have been too easy. Rather, we followed it backwards because we wanted to climb to hilltowns first and finish by the ocean for swimming. Basically, we were going the right way, they made the trail in the wrong direction.

It was beautiful. We rode through small farms with beautiful crops on the hillsides. Lots of olive trees and grapes mostly. There was a surprising amount of poverty; very small houses, lots of lived-in campers, very run down homes next to vibrant, breathtaking fields. Almost all of the crops were very well taken care of, though we saw no evidence of modern farming techniques; it seems to mostly be done by hand. Also the fields were big, but single family farms, not commercial at all. None more than 5-8 acres. Some of the farms were making their own olive oil and wine and selling it in fancy bottles to tourists. A few big mansions had recently been built up in the hills, but the owners were definately not farmers. There is a fair ammount of fallow ground, showing that a fair number of people have left farming for more prosperous professions (probably tourism around here). The roads were very rocky, rough dirt, but where the dirt is turned over for farming it is a beautiful dark red color that apparently is quite fertile. We saw one place with gigantic pumpkin sized winter squash growing.

As you can imagine we struggled with following the trail, but somehow always ended up back at the red signs. Lots of ups and downs (it seemed like more ups than downs), a fair amoutn of sweat, and after about 2.5 hours of pretty hard biking, we ended up at our first beach. Ah! Respite. We ate first lunch, went for a swim, and then immediately ate second lunch. Whew. We dried off, and moved on.

At this point, we had no water left and were very very thirsty, but somehow kept missing roads to towns and opportunities to buy water. Back on the main road, we bike past many many stands selling homemade wine, olive oil, fresh fruit....but no water.
Finally, at the edge of what we thought was Rovinj, we found a Konzum (Croatian grocery store) and Janna was sent in for water. She came out with water, a much needed Mars bar, and two pieces of bread. Note: Janna was sent in because Sue knew that she would not be able to resist bringing out a necessary chocolate snack, whereas Sue would have grabbed only water.
Somehow, we worked our way back to the water, found a beautiful beach, stopped, read, slept, swam, ate snacks, played cards, sunburned, and relaxed.

Getting back on our bikes, we realized we were quite a bit further south than we thought we were and still had quite the ride ahead of us....so we rode and rode along the coast. It was very very pretty, and finally we couldn't resist any longer and had to swim again. Ah, the Adriatic....this time, we didn't bother drying off, so with wet shorts we continued on our way.
At 5:45, we returned our bikes...It was an 8 hour biking bonanza. When asked what the best thing she saw on the trip was, Janna replied, "The Konzum with the water."
Showers, dinner (to-go), wandering, picture taking, dessert, cat-petting, and in our room before dark. Which, it should be noted, is when most of the Italians were just heading out.
Tomorrow morning we take a long bus ride to Plitvice lakes...it is unlikely that we will have internet tomorrow or the next night so you'll be lucky if you hear from us :)

Don't worry, plenty of pictures and stories when we emerge from our blackout.....