A Day Made for the GoPro

Author’s note:  This post covers the day of July 24^th.  I wrote it the afternoon of July 27^th while relaxing on the terrace of the house we are staying at in Zaton.

July 24^th was made for the GoPro, from beginning to end.  We slept in, well until 8, because we still wanted to get a lot of stuff in that day.  The breakfast at the hotel was good and free, bread, jam, omelette, coffee, juice.

We threw our stuff in the car and headed further south to the very tip of Istria and a park called Kamenjak.  We took a wrong turn in the town of Premantura, and another once we were inside the park (which has far more roads than the map showed), but we finally found our way to Colombarica Beach.  There we finally got to do some swimming, explored some small caves, and jumped off the rocks into the water.  I then relaxed in the sun for a bit while Smith did some more beach exploration.  Once I felt rested I chased him down, and in the process found a much higher ledge that some people were jumping off.

I felt I just had to do it.  The first time was certainly a little nervous, but I mustered up the courage.  I then jumped it twice more to get it from different angles with the GoPro.  The second time I was almost as nervous as the first, but the third time was easy.

After that we grabbed a drink at the very cool bar just above the beach.  It’s called Safari Bar and is a series of “rooms” created by naturally growing trees and palm fronds stacked up.  The ceiling is at about my head height everywhere, so it makes a nice shaded, cozy space.  Some rooms even had playground equipment like slides and swings for the kids.  We drank watermelon-canteloupe sangria before heading out of the park.

From the park we went back to Pula for lunch.  Smith really enjoyed his seafood platter, most everything lightly fried.  My dish was okay, stuffed peppers, but the Malvazija wine was once again very good.

After that we drove straight north through the middle of Istria to get to Pazin to see Pazin’s Chasm, a natural phenomenon that inspired some of Jules Verne’s writings despite the fact that he never actually went there.  We started on one side of the chasm, walked down through it and out the other side.

We had originally planned on walking through the town around the chasm to get back to our car, but there was a zip line across the chasm.  So of course we took it.  GoPro captured that ride too as we flew across the chasm and got off the line about 20 yards from our car.

After Pazin we tried to drive through a park that was said to have great views.  We got incredibly lost in the park though and ended up driving all over these mountains of gravel roads.  We asked a local how to get to the highest mountain, but it seems he sent us the wrong way because if we got to a point that if we had gone down that slope, I don’t think we would have ever gotten back up it.  So we turned around, and while in reverse the car started making a scraping noise.  We both figured something had gotten stuck and would come loose when we started going forward, but it continued.  We got out of the car and found a decent sized stick about the width of a quarter and a couple feet long.  The stick had somehow found its way over a hose and then twisted around so that the hose was in danger of being torqued out of its connections.  It took some work but we got the stick out.

We continued for a bit hunting around the gravel roads of the mountainside but never found our way to the rocky valley we were searching for.  Although we did run into a flock of sheep with one lone shepherd watching over them, and probably wondering what the hell we were doing there.  So, we gave up on the gravel roads and found our way back to the asphalt.  We were going to just drive to Rijeka, but we saw signs for the highest peak in the park, so we took that 7km ride up to the top where we could see for miles and miles.  This whole time in the park we never saw a single other tourist until we started to leave the peak, we saw one other car.

So, we finally got back on the road headed to Rijeka.  We got in late, just as the sun was beginning to set, and checked into our hostel.  At this point it was dark, I was tired and very hungry in yet another new place, and stressed from another day of driving and getting lost.  So, you can imagine my reaction when the car behind me parked incredibly close to me, and I bumped them trying to get out of my incredibly tight parallel parking space.  I was pissed, and the owner was just coming out to the car too.  But there was no damage, and we asked them to back up so we could get out.

Dinner that night was at some Croatian fast food place called Food City, but they were advertising Bampy brand food, I don’t know.  It was a crappy sandwich, but we just needed to eat.  After that we grabbed fries and McFlurries at McDonald’s because I just needed something to go down easy.  We returned to our hostel without incident and went to sleep.

The day ended stressful and a little unhappy, but there was a whole lot of fun and excitement the rest of the day, so I can’t look back on it as a bad day at all.