Day 175: Tuesday 9 September – Croatia: Another Quiet Day By The Adriatic, by Ken

After breakfast we drove Smarty into Omis to do a spot of supermarket shopping and found a Konzum on the main street. We had seen billboards by the motorway that read “Konzum, Croatian Word For Supermarket”. Perhaps that in Omis wasn’t representative of all Konzum stores, but I would have reworded the signs to read “Konzum, Croatian Word for cramped shop with antiquated check out system”. It really was disappointing, the aisles were very narrow and the queue for the two checkouts situated one behind the other filled an aisle preventing shoppers getting to the goods they wanted. The bar code scanners must have been Mk 1 models requiring items to be placed exactly over the reader and fruit and vegetables required the operator to look up a code for each item and enter it manually. Unfortunately the book of illustrations of fruit and vegetables didn’t match purchases. And, as we learnt on Saturday, Croatians don’t do queuing, our progress towards the checkout was slowed considerably by people jumping in ahead of us.

We left the Konzum with most of what we needed and drove straight back to Mabel. It was another fine day and we decided to make the most of it. I spent most of the day sitting under Mabel’s awning working on the blog, while Jane read and swam.

A woman passer by stopped and pointed to the front of Mabel. I went to investigate and found her front number plate had fallen off – again!  Both plates fell off while she was parked on Phil and Kerry’s drive within a few days of us taking possession of Mabel. I don’t know what was wrong with the double-sided tape Elite had used, but it didn’t have sufficient stickability for the job. I replaced their tape with Velcro which gripped so fiercely it could have fixed an elephant to a wall. However, while the hooks and eyes held together tenaciously, the Turkish sun melted the adhesive that stuck the Velcro to the plates and Mabel. Whenever Mabel was parked with a number plate facing into sun, the plate would droop. However, moving a plate back into place and applying a bit of pressure once things had cooled down seemed to restore things. This time it seemed the adhesive had done its dash and I strapped the plate back in place with some cable ties. It wasn’t worth doing a proper job because the plates will be redundant once Mabel gets to New Zealand.

Lunch was egg in a bowl.

We played two games of bananagrams over our G and T’s which I won followed by a couple of quizzes on stuff.

For dinner we ate baked potatoes with baked beans.

The evening was spent reading.