Peter's sketch of Hvar looking up the stairs to the fortress
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Sunday afternoon's high-speed ferry to Korcula from Hvar saved us a 5-hour conventional trip, compressing the journey to 1.5 hours. The boat felt much like an airplane, with similar seating and no outside seating options! We arrived about 5:30PM in Korcula and had a short walk to our hotel. Our room for the next 2 nights was almost the size of our house in St. Paul, with a water view! Great place to have an extra night and full day to explore. We had a lovely "reunion dinner" with our Santa Barbara buddies that evening at a terrific restaurant within the old city walls.
The view!
On Monday we did a loop ride with "extras" - every day has a climb of at least 7 to 10K that the group has deemed "volcanos", due to their shape on the topographic distance/elevation graph! That said, our biking friends are all great gamers and they are conquering those volcanos despite all of our collective misgivings at the start of the day. One feature of this ride was the steepest downhill 5K I have ever experienced - the views were stunning, but my right hand was almost cramping from the need to brake at every moment!
Yikes - sure steeper than it looks in this photo.
Amazing views are the payoff for climbing.
A leisurely coffee stop in Racisce.
Peter and I did a lovely add-on spur to the small fishing town of Racisce and sat having coffee, watching life slowly and peacefully unfold. We then enjoyed an easy ride back to Korcula, where Peter stopped at the hotel to clean up and go sketch while I continued on another short optional spur to the beach at Lumbarda. I rode back and chatted with with guide Cristina (who braved swimming in the cold Adriatic) and met Peter in the old town. He did some great sketches:
Time simply flies on these trips. After another convivial dinner, we packed in preparation for our next boat-bike-boat-bike day on Tuesday.
We awoke to warm, sunny day with cool breezes - lucky us! Our first boat ride was a short-hop private ferry to the Peljesac peninsula, a "volcano climb" (450 meters over about 6K), and a fabulous 8K downhill to the port town of Trpanj and our next ferry. We had about an hour to spend waiting to depart so we had MORE coffee - specifically cappuccinos that were works of art!
Epically beautiful downhill to Trpanj and the next ferry ride
We really enjoyed the ferry to Ploce - the sea was very calm, the sun warm and the breeze cool. The Croatian mainland is spectacular with arid peaks crashing down to the sea. The ride from Ploce to our hotel in Vid was the flattest stretch of riding since the trip began on May 12th - 27K of Minnesota-like grades that took us along the Neretva River.
The Archaeological Museum of Narona sits right across the street from our hotel, so we hurried to clean up and visit it before the 4 PM closing time. It is a great facility, both for its architecture and collection of artifacts taken directly from the site upon which it sits:(http://www.thebestinheritage.com/presentations/2008/archeological-museum-narona,18.html).
As ExPlus is always planning great diversions, Our group got back together at 6PM and had a wonderful boat ride on the Neretva River, which flows right along the back of our hotel. The grappa flowed freely and we got to see where some of our dinner specialties were obtained.
Dinner was entirely themed around the local specialties - we had fried frog, cheeses, and a local stew that contained frog, eel and whitefish in a spicy tomato base, served with polenta. It was quite good, albeit exotic. After a huge slice of chocolate torte I was ready to burst - but I wanted to get this blog entry done before our last bike ride tomorrow to Ston, just outside of Dubrovnik - so sorry to see the biking end, we will so miss this fab group of new friends!
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