We didn’t have a great night’s sleep so got up somewhat early to start on our day.
This is a duplicate picture from yesterday provided simply to show how close this bell tower is to our hotel. Why did we find this important? Because the single bell rings every hour and the multiple bells ring every six hours...and they are ~70 decibels in our hotel room.
The hotel provided a nice breakfast setup, although was odd to us in the current COVID situation, as it was self- serve buffet style. It doesn’t seem that COVID has had much of an impact on most of Croatia - at least that is how they act. After a few additional coffees and some time with decent WiFi, we headed to Old Town Zadar to check out the city’s history. On the way, we spotted several less crowded beach areas from the highway and made note for potential swimming later in the day.
Having now actually made it to Zadar, our first stop was at the water where they’ve built a “Sea Organ” that uses the waves to create music...mesmerizing to listen to.
We walked through Old Town Zadar (a couple times since we had to put more on our parking) admiring the mix of ancient city and Venetian influenced buildings...took a few pics:
We found a quiet, shady restaurant and had a tasty lunch snack in the middle of the Old Town, including a white wine that we both liked.
From Zadar we drove back up toward our hotel and pulled off on one of the beaches we spied on the way there to test the water. We swam for a while (water was much cooler than Turkey), then laid in the sun for an hour or so, trying desperately to hold on to our color.
After getting warm and dry again, we got back on the road and drove down the coast past our hotel to get dinner. We stopped at a nice restaurant in Pakoštane (just by chance) and had wonderful shrimp pasta and beef stroganoff.
After dinner we drove back to the hotel, caught up with Grace on the phone for ~1hr and sat in the lobby with a couple drinks (WiFi in the room was unbearable) to book our next hotel and do some writing.
Then to bed, bracing for a night of church bells...
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