Well, tried posting an update 2 days ago but somehow managed to screw it up so here we are now in Split, having arrived here yesterday afternoon.  Without a doubt the best day of riding yet, other than the last 20 clicks riding into the city, just over 300 kms of riding bliss, there were nice sweepers, lots of toe scraping corners, great views, little traffic and a few wind gusts that tried to push us off the road (actually looked like that's what happened to a small motor home). We actually woke up yesterday morning to a couple of deg. below zero and a bike covered in a thin layer of ice! but it warmed up nicely to a perfect 20 by midday.

Oh yeah, there was some tennis last week.  The team were quite happy with their 7th place finish out of 15 (29 countries overall) with losses to the US and Germany and wins over Sweden and South Africa.  Very hot the whole week which was not great for the players but good for me as while the teams were at their pre match practices, I was doing my early morning daily swims in the Adriatic (had to do something other than just watch tennis matches). 

Left Umag Sun morning and it wasn't very long before I knew something was wrong with our selected route, the first hint being that we show up in a lineup for the Italian border, which was North, when I know we should have been heading Southeast.  A Quick u-turn got us out of the lineup which was followed by us getting good and lost in the Mtns of Croatia all the while in a 3-way battle between myself, the GPS and my pillion rider. We resorted to the good old fashioned way of asking the locals for directions to get us pointed in the right direction.  The long and short of it was that we had a load of fun going through tiny mtn top villages, climbing in and out of valleys with more hairpins and roundabouts that we could possibly count.

After 295 kms, we make to Plitvice Lakes Nat'l Park, change out of our riding gear for hiking attire and go on a hike of the upper lakes portion of the park.  Just an amazing series of lakes set at different elevations with waterfalls between each and a cool mixture of trail and boardwalks linking them all together.  Finished off the day with a great dinner of veal and lamb which they had done on their spit and under cover, oh so good! 

They had forecasted rain for Mon and we were not deterred from completing the lower lakes and in order to avoid the crazy crowds that invade this park (20,000 a day in the summer) we set out early in the worst of the storm.  We got ourselves pretty wet just getting to our starting point and we decided I should go back to fetch our rain gear, which I did and set out again. We lost a precious hour and soon found ourselves dodging tour group after tour group on the way around. 

So, off to Dubrovnik tomorrow morning, about 220 kms if we don't get lost.