We had a relaxing morning, eating the pastries from Zagreb for breakfast plus a dish of mushrooms with pasta (leftovers from last night‘s dinner), along with coffees of course. We took advantage of the clothes washer in the apartment and ran a couple loads of laundry and cleaned ourselves up with showers.
Although a late start, we got the car from the garage and headed out to coast on the backroad rather than the highways. In getting down to the coast road we found this crazy-steep, one-lane downhill road that cut through a couple villages and dropped us out near the sea - fun but a bit hair raising too.
We drove the coast road for quite a while, which wound along the cliff side and gave us some great views.
We came across a beautiful gorge with a large coal fired power generation plant (Plomin Power Station) - the tallest built structure in Croatia (see at the right of the panorama pic). It seemed out of place in the rugged natual area.
Below is a cute “postcard frame” at a viewpoint near the plant - the unfortunate ship in the beautiful landscape is delivering coal to make electricity from.
We drove on to Pula and explored several of the ancient Roman ruins there, which included one of largest complete colosseums in the world. Here are a few pics...
After some walking around the sights in Old Town Pula, we came across a pizza place that was recommended in a video we watched - Pizzeria Jupiter. The pizza was good and it was in a cozy restaurant terrace. Don had to deal with the parking which was less than clear about how/where to pay, so Tammy made the choices for lunch (which were great!)...
Tammy ordered olives, thinking black sliced olives. We got whole pits in green olives.
After lunch we drove on to Rovinj which was further up the coast. Coming into town we (Don) made a wrong turn away from the City Center and ended up on the spendy resort side of the harbor. There was a parking garage there and a fancy resort+marina, with some nice swimming areas designed into the rock landscape.
We walked along the smooth concrete pathway to the beaches and found a little area where we could get by the water. We got our first chance here to put our feet in the Adriatic Sea!
The water wasn’t quite as warm as the Mediterranean in Antalya (our new benchmark), but it was very nice and clearly had a pebble not sand bottom...and less salt in the water.
From the resort side we could see the old town on the hill, so decided to find the way back over there to explore.
We found parking along the water and walked into the old city - no cars allowed. In the picture below Tammy has her new shirt on - she only brought 2 short sleeve shirts and after 32 days of wearing them over and over again it was time to refresh the wardrobe. Happy to say it only cost $5.
The city has two official languages, Croatian and Italian and was once part of the Venetian empire...you can see the similarity in the coastal buildings here.
A snip of the atmosphere in Rovinj
We couldn‘t believe that Venice is only a three hour ferry ride away, and this area certainly had a Venice vibe for sure.
After walking through the street, we drove back on the toll highway (which is really quite new/nice) before sunset, which took a couple hours off the route we took on the coast.
As we came into Rijeka we stopped at a huge grocery store and bought food for meals, which required more of our fruit weighing prowess - we did it like a local! Here is an example sign that we have to work with (Breskva is a Peach):
It was late when we got to the apartment, so dinner consisted of leftover pizza and some fish sticks - the dinner of champions.🤪
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