We’ve placed ourselves in a time box in Croatia: we arrive in Dubrovnik on August 25th; our tour ends on December 17th, when we fly from Barcelona to Taipei; and we can’t enter Italy until September 21st without violating Shenzhen Zone constraints; so we are stuck in Croatia for nearly four weeks. 

What to do?  Oh, I don’t know -let’s bike 650 miles, climb 50,000 feet, take 17 ferry rides, and visit 11 islands.  And eat.  You can rest assured that eating will occur on a regular basis, and the occasional food photo will make it into the blog.

We’ve been in Croatia once before, fairly briefly, in 2001.  We visited Dubrovnik and Korcula then and will again this time through, but everything else will be new for us.  The feature photo, in case you’ve wondered, is from that earlier tour.  Rachael is lying on the sea wall in Korcula, and it’s one of my favorite photos of her ever.  I like it well enough that it’s likely to stand through this entire tour, but we’ll see.

Except for a few days in the Istrian interior (Istria is the peninsula at the northwestern end of Croatia, next to the Slovenian and Italian borders), we’ll be spending most of the next month on the Adriatic coast, and mostly on islands to avoid traffic on the coastal highway.  And in case you’re wondering about the odd shape of our route at the southeast end, it’s not a mapping mistake.  Our trip begins with a ferry loop: ferry from Dubrovnik to Korcula; bike back toward Dubrovnik along the Peljesac peninsula, to Ston; ferry to the island of Mljet; and ferry from Mljet back to Korcula again.