We took it easy this morning with a couple coffees and catching up on mail, chats with family, etc. We are fortunately right above a pastry shop, so it was our first stop when we left the room.
We took our bakery food to the square in front of the Diocletian's Palace and ate while we people-watched with cappuccinos. The square has padded seating on the steps around it and they have live music there every night - pretty epic setting.
This is also the entrance to the palace’s famous cellar which now simultaneously serves as a gateway to the waterfront. After finishing our breakfast we chose to pay for access to the palace cellar which had remained untouched for centuries until excavations in the last 50 years.
There is ~30% left to excavate - here is a place where they are still working...
Amazingly intricate stone work everywhere...
An excavated timber from floor framing..,
After the cellars, we needed to walk to the ferry terminal to find the current sailings (severely altered due to COVID) so we could plan our island-hopping leg of the trip. We found some information and went back to the room to sort out all the sailing logistics for five islands. After a couple hours we had a good outline and went to confirm and get all the ferry tickets. After getting the tickets from two separate companies (hooray!), we started to walk over to the city beach when this happened:
We walked a ways in this cloudburst until we got under cover...within 15 minutes it was sunny again. We walked the back streets from the beach to Old Town and then spent some more time getting these pics in the city...
Apparently if you rub the big toe of this statue of Gregory of Nin you’ll have good luck - seemed like cheap insurance so we did...
...safely of course!
The Golden Gate - one of four gates into the palace
To give a sense of scale of Old Town Split, we hunted for ~30min to find this famous ice cream/pastry shop (Luka Ice Cream and Cakes) - the fig/orange/walnut ice cream was to die for and is made all natural! These were some of the other temptations...
After ice cream, we went back to the room and booked hotels on the islands and researched rental cars. The island planning has been tricky and would have been nearly impossible to do if we weren’t here to get the current info and suggestions.
For dinner we had some delicious pasta carbonara and a fresh chicken salad at a place we’d scouted during the day. We stopped in a local special store and bought meat and cheese for our evening/ferry ride tomorrow, then went back to the room and enjoyed the bottle of wine with all the windows open. A nice final night in Split.
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