Day 14 - Team Work Makes The Dream Work

Apparently.

Very comfortable night. We have got ourselves a bit more organised now & learnt from our mistakes.

At 7.30am, I returned from the bakery with our pasties & croissant, then sat down with my coffee. I looked across at our neighbours in the blue transit van & nearly spat out my coffee out. The wife is a very large chain smoking lady who was sat in her reinforced camping chair facing us in a short dress with her legs wide open. All I could see was acres exposed belly flesh hanging down between her legs. Nearly put me off my meat pasty!

I think she realised what we could see, so she turned her chair around to face away from us.

At 8.30 we emptied the car & the inside of our tent, then methodically packed everything up. We started with our remaining clean clothes going into our rucksacks & any dirty clothes into a full black bin liner. I didn’t have much to contribute to the bin liner because I had worn nothing but 3 pairs of shorts during the entire camping stay.

We packed up the tent & all the extras & slowly & carefully loaded up the car. Once the boot was full the cycle rack & bikes were attached & the top box filled. Afterwards we showered & put some actual clothes on, then packed up the remainder of our stuff & departed around 12.15pm.

Our first proper experience of camping had on the whole been very positive, even Jackie would agree with that. Just as well because we are doing it all over again in 2 days time!

The facilities were were very good & clean & quiet. It helped that it was apparently only about 40 percent full.

There are some, what can only be described as ‘characters’ attracted to camping, which made for great people watching.

1. Our Big lady & her ‘Compo’ husband neighbours who spent nearly the entire 5 days asleep in their transit van.

2. Nudie who returned to the beach on 2 further occasions without her husband & paraded around.

3. Lilo Lil, a German Lady who liked to walk up & down the beach all day without her top on, but with her lilo tucked under her arm.

4. The Munsters, a family of 5, who had all the gear including a speedboat, but seemed very scruffy & a bit simple looking. I’m being polite.

5. Gobby German interrogator & her entourage.

I could go on & on.

On the outskirts of Novalja, we stopped at a hyper market & picked up some essentials - plastic wine glasses, washing line, scourer, washing detergent, 2 boxes of white wine & 8 large packets of our new favourite crisps.

We then headed south through the Island of Pag. Jackie took the opportunity to check our emails & discovered we should have already sent more money by bank transfer to our next campsite. This caused a panic for about an hour until the campsite emailed us to say we could pay on arrival.

Our journey followed the Adriatic down to Pag Town where we crossed a bridge back to Croatia mainland. We eventually arrived at Posedarje & followed Jadransko more (a big lake) round until we reached our second Novigrad. This was a delightful village with a castle on Jadransko more.

After a leg stretch, we continued on the scenic route to Skradin & one entrance to Krka National Park. It was just after 3.00pm, when we located our accommodation, Rokovaca guest house. We have a gorgeous bijou self contained apartment & the enthusiastic host Vishna (translates to Cherry in English) rattled off our options to visit Krka NP & her recommended restaurants.

We took a stroll around the small fortified town, which was teeming with day trippers, then returned to the solitude of our apartment with it’s balcony for a wine & a shower.

At 7.30pm, we arrived at the highly rated Konoba Dalmatino for a keenly anticipated decent hot meaty dinner. Jackie had steak in pepper sauce with pom frites & ratatouille, whilst I had the house speciality of beef in red wine sauce with gnocchi & a side order of pom frites. The meat was so tender & delicious, which we washed down with white wine & sparkling water.

After a quick nightcap of the complimentary homemade sherry provided by our host Cherry, we hit the sack & were asleep by 9.30pm.

Song of the Day : Pack It Up by Gonzalez.Read more