The days pass so quickly here! Things go by in a blur, and by evening I can barely remember what I did in the morning. Part of this is the fact that there are just so many things to do each day. But there is something else, too. There is something about having all your activities planned for you which makes it makes hard to actually focus on where you have been and what what you did. It is that lack of the advance planning that forces me to learn the names of places and how these places fit together on a map. It does not help, either, that most places names in Croatian more or less sound alike to me. The names are pretty, full of zh’s and sh’s and y’s, but unlike French or Italian, where I may understand the meaning of the place names, these are almost nonsense syllables to me. And so after we finish an activity I check the photos on my phone to see where we were and to connect these lovely memories with some larger time and place so that they are something more than a kind of lucid dream.
This morning we left Zadar fairly early. I was vaguely sorry we had not had a bit more time there, particularly to see the cathedral and climb the bell tower, but I cannot say I had a deep sense that I had missed anything important. We sailed a short distance across a narrow strait to the small port of Priko on the island of Ugljan. Apparently this is close enough to Zadar that some people live on this island and take a ferry to work in Zadar each day. Preko did not seem like a particularly attractive bedroom suburb to me, though I can hardly say that it was ugly, either. Just rather nondescript. I suspected that most of it had been built in the last days of the socialist republic when making anything interesting or attractive was probably evidence of suspect bourgeois tendencies. We biked through the nearly deserted streets of the town until we found the main highway. We had to ascend a rather steep hill to get to the road, and even the “turbo” setting on my e-bike was not quite enough for me to make it without walking the bicycle a few feet.
From there the rest of the trip was fairly easy. This was our route.
After the ship left Zadar, we sailed to Preko. We rode our bikes from Preko to Tkon where the boat met us.
Compared to yesterday, we were traveling on somewhat busier roads for much of the way, but even here the traffic was hardly bad. We stopped on the bridge as we crossed over to the island of Pušman.
I admired the view here, and took a couple pictures.
I was a little disheartened, though, to see graffiti on the bridge. One of the many nice things about Croatia, compared to some other countries in this area, is the relative absence of tagging. After everybody caught up with us, we continued riding.
The names of the towns we passed by were often quite pretty: Kali, Kukljica, and Zdrelac were my favorites with Dobropoljana scoring an honorable mention. The scenery was not quite as dramatic as on Dugi Otok, either, but we often passed through small olive groves and saw small villages squares with lined palms and oleanders. We stopped again at a coffee shop about ten kilometers before the end of the route.
I ordered what the Croatians call a “white coffee.” This is something close to a cafe au lait. The normal Croatian “kavi” is an espresso, but one that seems even stronger and harsher than its Italian counterpart.
Meanwhile, Laura fixed Lucy’s hair.
I asked Mike and Wendy for a better picture than I had taken the first day.
After a short ride, we arrived at the tiny port of Tkon where we boarded the boat. Our ride was just about a long as the ride yesterday, but it seemed much easier and even a little bit shorter.
Just after we parked our bikes, John took a picture of the figurehead on the front of the boat.
We had lunch, and at lunch Marin told us that we could not spend the night at another island as originally planned because the harbormaster there had told our captain that all their berths were full. So sailed to Ragoznica where we had spent our first night instead.
In the evening John and I strolled about the town a bit. It is amazing on a trip when you come back to a place where you have already been it strangely feels like home. But the place was much more full of people than it had been only a few days ago. I guess the summer rush is on!
