10 May – Zadar and Nin

10 May – Zadar and Nin

Today we set out early to ride 37km to Decathlon in Zadar where we wanted to replace Kris’s rear tire that was starting to deform. As usual we had excellent customer service at Decathlon – the bicycle mechanic there, Bruno, helped us immediately and was very friendly.
The road there was fairly easy with a few nice long gentle downhills, meandering through the dry scrubby flats. However there was too much traffic for it to be pleasant.

Then we rode around Zadar for a while, it has a nice waterfront and some very old fortified walls.

We had some snacks and a (Belgian) beer at a waterside cafe before setting off on our last 20km to Nin where we had booked accommodation. There was an off road bicycle route alongside the main road that came and went for parts of this ride, but otherwise it was fairly unexceptional.

Nin is lovely, you cross a bridge onto an island to get to it. It is a tourist place but very quiet as it is out of season.

There is a cute old town and some Roman ruins.

A lady (tourist) was singing in German in this church – it sounded wonderful and reverberated right around the outside of the church into the little town – it has amazing acoustics.

Here is Gregory of Nin again – a smaller but similar statue to the one we saw in Split. His toe is all shiny from people rubbing it (for luck).

Our accommodation is great – large, light and airy apartment with a balcony. The couple renting it were super friendly – they looked very relieved when they realised that we could speak German as their English is not good. They lived and worked in Germany for 12 years. They gave us some wine, sparking water and cake as welcome gifts!

We went out again after a quick unpack to ride around the other side of the island – there was not much going on there with some of the houses looking closed up.

We put our feet into the water (it was not too cold and beautifully clear) and eventually circled back to the old town for a beer at a pub near the bridge.

This time we drank Belgium beer (Leffe Blonde and Dunkel) as the only Croatian beer they had was the one we know we don’t like. Kris ventured to try the dark version of the Croatian beer (too malty and sweet but better then the other one), I stuck with the Belgian.

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