Even the best laid plans go astray and mine were not particularly well laid so it's perhaps not surprising that Wednesday night found me sitting on board the MV Marko Polo in Ancona bound for Split with an S, not Zadar with a Zed, thus completely ruining my carefully contrived arriverderci to Italy!
Staying in a youth hostel is good for one's morale. I left Rimini hostel in high spirits after the dolly bird receptionist had called me a 'ragazzi' in booking ahead at Ancona. She said I was much younger than she was since she couldn't possibly consider cycling that distance! This blatant flattery caused me to set off thoughtlessly following other cyclists in broadly the right direction...straight into a giant clothes market! I then pfaffed around on the outskirts of town trying to get on the right road, ie not the autostrada or SS, and finally found a sort of coast road as far as Catholica, where the map showed a nice wiggly green bit.
Hell's teeth! I should have looked more carefully at the word 'monte' because the wiggly bit was 20k of severe coast hills! I ducked out after 5k and back on to the boring, straight SS road...for about 50k of the most dire, dirty and dismal riding I have yet encountered. It got me to Ancona about 5.00ish to find the Zadar ferries have now stopped for the winter. It was Split or nothing.
Fortunately Graham was kind enough to drive the considerable extra distance and gather me in safely to his bijou hideway in Starigrad Paklenica, squeezed between the strikingly dramatic hills of the national park and the strikingly empty Adriatic beaches.
I've cycled about 2000km. Quo vadis?
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