It
was time to start heading northwards in Croatia if we wanted to fit in
everything else we wanted to do on our trip.
It
was raining heavily when we left the camping ground. The rain persisted as we
drove westwards along the coast towards Split, in places the road was under
water. As we started to retrace the motorway route we had taken south on Sunday
we could barely see the fortress on top of the hill in Klis through the murky
grey rain.
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| Heading Towards Split In The Rain |
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| Klis Fortress On A Murky Day |
The
rain gradually eased as we travelled west and the sky lightened. Emerging from
a tunnel we found ourselves driving almost into bright sunshine. It seemed my
theory that tunnels control the weather in Croatia was correct!
The
skies cleared almost completely for a while but then, ahead, we could see very
dark clouds building and almost forming an archway over the road. Jane had been
keen to do more than half the driving today to try and close the gap between us
in terms of kilometres driven. We were well passed the half way point of our
trip when the sky ahead got very dark. While Jane wanted to drive some more she
decided the ugly looking weather ahead was a sign she had perhaps done enough
for the day. She pulled into the next service area and I took over behind the
wheel.
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| Cloud Archway |
Jane’s
timing couldn’t have been better. Within just a few minutes I drove into a
torrential thunderstorm with by far the heaviest rain of the whole trip. It was
very dark except during lightning flashes that were quickly followed by loud,
rumbling thunder suggesting we were right in the middle of the storm. I, and
most other drivers, slowed to a crawling pace. It seemed a long while before we
finally cleared the storm and were into brighter weather again.
By
the time we left the motorway and took a country road towards the small town of
Tisno there was just scattered cloud.
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| Konzum - Croatian For Supermarket (or cramped shop with antiquated check out system) |
Nearing Tisno we had a fine view of the
island of Murter a short distance off the mainland. At Tisno we crossed a short
swing bridge onto the island heading for Autocamp Slanica on the north west
coast. Satnav announced we had arrived there when we clearly hadn’t. By the
time we realised the error we had pulled off the road and couldn’t get back without
unhitching Smarty. We decided to drive the last kilometre independently. The
approach road to the camping ground was very narrow with little room for error
as I squeezed Mable between steel railings and a stone wall.
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| Camping Ground Approach Road |
Inside
the camping ground wasn’t a lot better with trees either side of the road
requiring a serpentine path to get to our pitch. While we couldn’t get a pitch by
the water’s edge, we got the next best thing on an elevated platform one row
back from the water giving us a fine view over to Kornati Island a few
kilometres away. The channel between Murter and Kornati was quite busy with
sailing boats that mainly seemed to be motoring past.
Having
set up Mabel with her awning facing the water we ate lunch of cheese on toast.
We had only just finished when the storm we had driven through reached Murter
and we had to sit through it all over again. At least that time we didn’t have
the challenge of driving.
Jane
spent the afternoon reading while I researched the requirements for importing
Mabel and Smarty into New Zealand. While complicated, and I could see it could
take a while to sort everything out, the process didn’t seem unduly onerous. I decided I
would manage the importation myself rather than pay a not insignificant sum to get
others to do it for us. I also spent some time working on the blog.
For
dinner I cooked macaroni with a spicy pesto sauce and salami. Afterwards we
played two games of banagrams on the small circular table indoors. It wasn’t
ideal being too small to encourage a lot of rearrangement of tiles. Jane won
both games, but that was nothing to do with the size of the table.
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| Today's Trip (144km) |
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