July 3rd, Up the Cetina River

7/3       Wednesday

            We’re taking a boat ride up the Cetina River today, small tourboats, just a dozen or so aboard. As we leave the dock, my camera batteries die, so no camera for the cliff views, oh well.

It’s nearly as big a scene as Zion. Huge stone mountains surround our little river. The river is fairly shallow, very clear and fresh. We see fishing camps along the way, small outhouse-like buildings, open to the water. Each has a small seat, maybe an old bucket seat from a car, and fishing paraphernalia in the hut. What’s funny is to see the row of fish-huts, with some old guy sitting on his seat, fishing away, and his neighbors fishing beside him, on the other side of the rickety wall, all of them fishing alone together.

The boat lands at a park with a couple of snack shacks and an open-air restaurant. The restaurant has a great cook-table of charcoal fires. They make a country style bread, cooking it in the coal ash, and various stews and grilled meat or fish. I find a 50 kuno note on the ground, and that’s exactly what a small loaf costs. Fate! It must be good, because Bob usually buys a loaf of bread at the bakery for 8 or so kunos. We get a giant round of bread, and it is really nice. We’ll save half to give our host when we return home.

We go back to the beach after our boat trip. It’s late in the day, only a couple of hours of beach time left. The umbrella lady says something in Croatian, we don’t understand, but she comes with our change and says we get the umbrella “gratis”, because it's late. Street vendors understand the value of return customers.

This umbrella lady is about seventy - at least - with white jeri-curly hair, dark brown tanned skin, wearing a little purple bikini. Not a so-called bikini two-piece either, but an all out (oh, yes) authentic string bikini. All the beaches are full of burnt-sienna skinned, bikini-wearing grandmas, in varied stages of rotundity, sitting in small huddles, smoking and talking. It’s like Miami Beach in the sixties.

1 Video Included

Omis House on a Hill

July 2nd, Day at the Beach

7/2       Tuesday

            Bob has left his computer’s power adapter at our last apartment. We can take the bus back to retrieve it, but instead, we ask around the city and manage to find an electronics supply shop. Success! And for less than the price of bus fare. Now we can enjoy the city’s expansive, sandy beach, a real treat for Bob. The water is shallow out for about 100 yards to the buoy border, and the entire bottom is soft sand. We rent two lounge chairs and an umbrella for the day, $12!

         After our swim, we go back to our rooms, and find our host and family sitting at their patio table on the floor below us. We’re invited to join them for a glass of wine from their own vineyards. We have an enjoyable visit with our host, his mom and his girlfriend. His mother doesn’t speak English, but his girlfriend is fluent. We have a good time talking about Croatia and their culture, telling them about the U.S., and how much we’re enjoying Europe. Croatia has just this week joined the E.U., and we hear mixed reviews of that from the people we’ve met. Croatians are extremely proud of their country, and have a real appreciation for the natural resources, especially the beautiful, clean water. Most say that the E.U. will increase prices for everything and jeopardize their environment.

We spend an hour talking, and they invite us to join them for a barbeque on Friday, something they like to do for their houseguests. We readily accept! Our host's mom gives us a big bottle of lavender shampoo as we leave.

July 1st, Omis

7/1       Monday

            We can take a local bus to Omiš, about 25 miles down the coast. Easy-Peasy. We need to contact our host, so we head to a café with wifi to send him a message, where we enjoy “natural lemonade,” which is fresh lemon juice with water, no sugar until you add your own. Wakes you up! Our host arrives at last takes us to our apartment on the hill. The drive up becomes long and steep. Where he drives, we have to walk, so we’re quite relieved when he finally stops.

            The hill is not really so bad, and we have a beautiful view to the waters, out across an old terraced farm, with no houses in front of us. The balcony wraps around the front of the building, all private for us. Our host's girlfriend has prepared an extravagant lunch platter for us, with prosciutto, cheeses and salad and juice, “all organic and natural” she says proudly.

            We walk back into town for provisions, planning carefully to avoid lugging too much back up the hill (Note: Remember - Hills are good for you). The traffic is busy through the city center and the streets are full of tourist families. It’s always a little stressful to get organized on the first day, you need to find out where everything is. The city is full of old, narrow stone streets, ancient, small churches and Roman remnants of carvings and doorways. The massive grey mountains spring up nearly right from the sea, on three sides, leaving not much room for the buildings. This is why the river inlet was such a popular hideout for the pirates. We can see a fortress over the city, and another even higher up on the mountain crest. Maybe we’ll hike to it. Maybe not.

1 Video Included

 Omis Old Town

June 30th, Another Swim Day

6/30     Sunday

            We need another swim day! This time we stay close to home, and find a good spot at the rocks past the harbor. There are just a few families out, no crowds. There are hermit crabs all along the rocks and some interesting little fish. Later, we go home to organize for our departure.  That’s about it.

June 29th, Stobreč Swim Day

6/29     Saturday

            We want to have a relaxing swim day today. We take a walk to the town across the bay, passing through the campground at the woods by the water in Stobreč. It’s a nice, three-star campground. There are no gigantic bus home campers, just small travel trailers with screen rooms attached to them, a few tents, and small bungalows to rent. As we get to the beach area, we have a rain delay. There’s a black cloud of thunderstorms heading toward us from the mountains, and another coming across the channel from Brac Island. It looks like we’ll have a massive downpour coming together. We take cover in a café and linger over a latte for about an hour. It rains, but lightly, and lets up enough for us to head back to Stobreč.

            By the time we reach our own beach, the sun is out and we have a beautiful day for a swim after all.

June 28th, Trogir Old Town

6/28     Friday

            We could spend a hundred dollars or so for a tour to the UNESCO site of Trogir, but instead, we’ll catch the local bus and pick up a map at the tourist office. We get on the most indirect bus, which takes us the long way around, through the least attractive, factory filled, working class side of Split. It’s about an hour and a half ride, and while it is truly interesting, we’re glad when it’s over and buy tickets for the “Fast Bus” for our return trip.

Trogir is a fortress city on a small island, with just a footbridge separating it from the mainland. There are several small churches and an ancient fort, and narrow medieval streets filled with restaurants and tourist shops. We have a coffee in the main plaza and listen as the tour groups are serenaded by a men’s chorus singing traditional songs.

We go into the Cathedral of St. Stephen on the plaza, another lovely site, and naturally we have to climb the bell tower. The doorway has a sign “You climb the tower on your own responsibility,” So we are warned. The stairs are narrow, and cantilevered off the wall in a fragile-looking way, with iron rails along most of the steps, not all. In the USA, this would have the liability lawyers handing out business cards in the square. “Were you traumatized by the Cathedral Stairs? Call 1-800-IGOT-SCARED.” We do make it to the top alive and enjoy the views. We actually make it down alive as well.

We walk through the city, making a casual tour, enjoying the island cruise boats docked at the pier, where vendors are selling nice hand carved toys, local cheese and olive oils, and embroidered tablecloths. The cruisers are not huge, room for a hundred or less, with masts for sailing that seem to be only decorative. They travel in a caravan of six or seven in a row, stopping at the islands from Zadar or Split, on the way down the coast to Dubrovnik.

The Fast Bus gets us back to Split in less than 30 minutes, where we easily get a connection back to Stobreč.

 

1 Video Included

Trogir Old Town

June 27th, Split Museums

6/27     Thursday

            Today we grab a bus to Split from our local bus stop just a few blocks from our place, for a little touristing.

The Gallery of Fine Art has a nice collection in a building that used to be a hospital. It’s now a series of galleries arranged around an open courtyard. The collection begins with some very interesting 13^th Century religious art, then offers a sampling of Croatian artists to the present day. It’s interesting work that’s not widely available. The paintings seem to us to be dark and somber, perhaps reflecting the difficult history of the region.

After the art, we visit the Croatian Maritime Museum. This is a fairly simple museum, considering the intense relationship of the Croats with the sea. It has some artifacts and model ships, and one wing devoted to military paraphernalia. Still, it’s pretty interesting overall.

We return to the harborside plaza for a snack. We enjoy an octopus salad at a chic café with a sea breeze. We nearly head for home, but the summer home of Ivan Meštrović is close by, so we’re determined to make a visit. Our walk there takes us past the yacht marina, always a fun site. There’s some kind of sailing event going on, because the waters are filled with the sails of small Lasers. A little further on, we pass the large state park that borders the city. Then we arrive at the gallery.  The Ivan Meštrović gallery was designed by the sculptor as a summer home, studio and exhibition center. It has a gorgeous site on a rise overlooking the sea, and today the view through the junipers shows the sea full of the Laser sails in the distance. It seems that we can see hundreds of sails dancing over the waves like feathers on pointe. The works in the gardens and house are fantastic. They are not organized chronologically, and what is interesting is that there’s no apparent learning curve, the work is all mature, the aesthetic vision is unified throughout, there’s no “early work.” It’s all gorgeous. There are large and small pieces, marble, bronze and wood. The female figures are beautifully soft, the marble is as smooth as butter. The male figures are aggressively virile. Many are of religious themes, a pieta, Job, Madonna and child.
A little further down the street is a private chapel, also on a spectacular property at the cliffs over the sea. Here is a courtyard leading to a simple stone chapel, decorated with wooden panels carved in bas relief, depicting scenes from the life of Christ. It manages to be understated and complex at the same time. The gestures and expressions are wonderful.

2 Videos Included

 Split Museums Part 1

Split Museums Part 2