wandering around europe – part 3


After my overnight stay down near Novo mesto in Slovenia I decided to head into Croatia. By this stage of the trip the weather had certainly warmed up with some fabulous vistas set off by wonderful blue sky.

During the first part of the day I was by and large on empty and quiet roads – although as I reached the Croatian coast, not surprisingly the roads were busier through the small towns – and it was easy to see why Croatia has become so popular with tourists, the combination of magnificent scenery, plentiful and cheap accommodation and all set in a glorious climate is a quite a pull.

As I hadn’t been to Bosnia & Herzegovina before I decided that I would head for a border crossing and work my way down to the Croatian coast that way. It wasn’t entirely incident free and in some respects wasn’t a great experience for me – although I’ll not make a definitive judgement on that experience, but without setting out the detail (that will come later this year when my book is published), I had some ‘problems’ with my paperwork and then ended up with my bike on top of me and injuring my right leg … and all of that before leaving the border crossing.

Having towards 600Lbs of Kawasaki pinning you to the ground really is less than ideal.

I headed down to the Krka National Park  and decided to stay for two nights. As much as I like to ride it made sense to take a day off the bike, partly because I wanted to spend time in the national park and partly because my leg was sore and uncomfortable.

The accommodation was good and provided an opportunity to wash through some clothes –  having being on the bike for the best part of a week it made the timing was ideal. The plus 40C temperatures made for quick drying and the hotel ironed tee shirts for me at no cost.

On my day off the bike I headed into the national park (early) and it was simply fabulous and a place of great beauty.  My trip also allowed me to slip into full on tourist mode, even getting one of the parks shuttle bus’s back towards my hotel.

After that it was a lazy afternoon and evening with a few beers in the sun. The following day I skipped the hotel breakfast and was on the road for 06:30, mainly to avoid doing too much riding the intense afternoon heat. I headed into the hills and then back down to the Dalmatian coast and ended up traveling past Dubrovnic and onto the quite pretty seaside town of Cavtat (where I stayed for a night), in accommodation that at best was average.

There’s a bunch of pictures in the gallery below from my ride down to Cavtat

Here’s a link to Part Four If you’ve not seen the previous posts from the trip you can see them here: Part One and Part Two