Croatia: Finally on the boat!

We arrived in Split, Croatia, at 4am on July 20th and promptly went to sleep on a bench outside the bus depot, now that we are old hands at public sleeping. Once busses starting running, we headed for the marina at Kastela, only 20 minutes or so away. It is named after castles that are all along this part of the coast, built by the Turks when they controlled this part of the world.

We arrived at the boat, which is “on the dry” at the moment, to friendly hellos and hugs and finally getting to put faces to names. Celia, Dylan and Fanfaron DO exist! Their friends Ger and Nuria, from Argentina, have joined the crew for the trip to South America, as well.

Celia, getting the fridge working for the impending journey. I can't wait. I haven't had easy access to a fridge for almost a month, which definitely makes you more creative with your shopping and cooking but makes you dream about things like really cold oranges. And ice cubes.

Dylan playing Lego on the boat. Nelson helped him draw up the plans for this house he's making.

Ger and Nuria. It’s great because the languages of the boat are Spanish and English, so we are all improving our language skills.

Besides all translating between English and Spanish, we are also at times translating between British English (Celia is from the UK) and Canadian English. The boat is aluminium, which is pretty funny because it is one of those words that Brits and Canucks say differently, so all day it’s “you say alu-MIN-ium , we say al-OO-min-um”

Dylan and I, reading a book about polar bears. I do miss snow!

Nelson, reporting live for the CBC from the marina restaurant.

Nuria playing under the table.

The plan is to get back in the water as close to the end of the month as possible, so we got right to work on the underside of the boat. We got to play with power tools, which is always fun!

How Eurohot is that?
Two days, zinging arms and dozens of sanding disks later, the keel is bare and ready to be epoxied! I am learning a lot.

We are also getting things prepared inside the boat. Ger and I put some much-needed brighter paint in our bedrooms. The previous owners were big fans of grey and black which makes the boat a little dreary.

Here I am learning about the 'stern tube' and how to adjust its compression properly. This is one of 11 places where water can come into the boat, so it is important to be familiar with it.

Inside the keel box.

Inside the keel box.

It is hot, hot, HOT in Croatia! I know that many places in Canada and the UK are having really cold summers but there is a heatwave happening here. It is over 40Celsius most days so we have learned to work early in the morning. For those who know me well, you’d be very surprised at how willing I am to get up and work at 6am just to have a few hours of bearable temperature! But this means we have to take beach breaks for the hottest part of the day, so it's all okay.

An exciting decision was made to change the boat’s name to ‘Selkie’ after reading an excellent article on sailing across the Atlantic (thanks, Kari!) . It talks about how silly the superstition is that you shouldn't change a boat's name and about how the name of a boat becomes its personality which is intertwined with the personality of its owner. Fanfaron means ‘braggart’ in French which is quite the opposite of Celia’s personality, so Selkie it now is. It’s the name of a mythical sea creature from the Orkneys which changes from seal to human form and back again.

We are taking sailing lessons from Celia, learning how to plot our position on the chart, choose a course, and recognize and navigate obstacles. I am also reading a book on everything you need to know to become a 'yachtmaster' (Nelson refuses to call me "Yachtmaster" until I am finished it, however), and a French book on being a sea vagabond (thanks, Nick, for the loan) which is more the dreamy side of it all. It starts by suggesting you ask yourself one fundamental question: "Do I really want to live and travel on a sailboat?" My answer, for the next several months anyways, still feels like a resounding 'yes', so I guess I am in the right place at the right time. There is also another quote in it, from Jacques Brel, which I really like:

"The act of dreaming is important in itself. I wish you an endless flood of dreams and the intense desire to make some of them come true. I wish you love for what should be loved and forgetting for what should be forgotten. I wish you passions. I wish you silences. I wish you bird song on awakening and the laughter of children. I wish you resistance to being swallowed up, to indifference, to the negative virtues of our age. Above all, I wish you to be yourself."

This all definitely feels like a dream being enacted. Nelson and I regularly turn to each other and say "We're in Croatia! Living on a sailboat!" And this is just the beginning. I am really looking forward to being in the water, at the helm with the wind in my hair, making people swab the decks and walk the plank, and all other such romantic seafaring notions.

Selkie, prepare to be boarded! Aaarrh!! (you have to imagine this in my best pirate accent, which has been expertly analysed to be a mix of Swedish and Transylvanian accents)

LJ

Trieste: Always be prepared (to sleep in a piazza)

JULY 18-19TH
Finally it was time to leave climber’s paradise and head for sailor’s paradise: Croatia. Unfortunately, the wonderful European train system stops abruptly near the border between Italy and Slovenia, and we found ourselves needing to spend one last night in Italy before catching a bus to Split, Croatia, where we would be meeting up with the boat and its inhabitants. The town is called Trieste and is the seat of Roman civilization, or something like that, and really quite pretty.

Unfortunately, this makes it quite a destination for Italians and thus pretty expensive. After being quoted prices like 220 Euros (~$300) for pretty generic hotels, and it being too late at night to get out of town to find camping, Nelson suggested we think about sleeping in a park. I wasn’t sure how safe that would be until we came across a dozen or so German girls (literally girls, 12-18 years of age), who had also been unable to find affordable accommodation and who had decided to bunk down on a patch of grass in a piazza. We decided to join them, thinking that by being older and a bit more muscular we could provide them with some protection for the night. Boy, were we wrong! They were definitely the ones who kept us safe. They organized everyone to put their packs in the middle and sleep in neat rows around them, and to have two girls at a time stay awake for one hour shifts to watch over the bags and everyone (they wouldn’t let us take a shift). A few times I woke up to drunk men getting a bit too close to the group and five girls getting right up in their faces and scaring them off. And when the police showed up in the middle of the night, they charmed them into letting us all stay until daybreak. Phew! In the morning we learned they were girl scouts who had just spent a week hiking in the mountains in Slovenia. I was pretty impressed.
We spent the next day checking out the town.
My definition of an 'old' building has definitely changed! This is an ampitheatre built in the days of the Roman empire.

This is a real live drawbridge on a castle.

Nowadays they just have a red an white bar across the entrance to keep out unwanted visitors.

Okay, now an 11-hour overnight bus to Split!

Arco: A climber's paradise

JULY 7TH - 18TH
As we are wont to do after spending a few days in an urban centre, we headed for the hills to climb. We got to the train station early in the morning, bought our tickets to ‘Trento’ (the nearest train stop to Arco), went to the right platform at the right time, got on the train and went to sleep for the three hour journey north-west, only to wake up to the announcement that we were in Bologna (~3 hours south-west) and it was the last stop! We still don't know what we did wrong but the current theory is that we were supposed to change trains in Verona (of Romeo and Juliet fame). A very nice customer service agent interpreted our charades accurately (our Italian is improving daily but still pretty pitiful) and put us on the right train. Luckily we started early enough in the morning to allow for having taken the scenic route!

And here we are in a climber’s paradise. This is how Arco promotes itself and I have to admit they’re pretty right on the money there. There was one particularly nice rock that Nelson especially loved in the conglomerate at Montserrat and we have discovered that it was limestone and ALL the cliffs here are made of it. It’s the opposite of Montserrat in that all the holds go inward in little fun pockets and grooves, rather than being positive features.
Me climbing on a small crag but with my eye on the bigger wall behind. We later did a multi-pitch route on it, which was fantastic.

We met a wonderful Italian couple, Sarah and Ketriss, who invited us to climb with them for the next few days and we had much fun being shown great routes and even better swimming spots – especially the climbing area that had the lake at its base!

Finished the climb, let’s swim!

Wa hoo!
Yippee!!

Ketriss is in the military and spent some time in Bosnia during the war, so we were also able to learn a bit more about the history and politics of the area we are headed towards.

In addition to the obvious things that make Arco a paradise for climbers, like good climbing, it was also a pretty little town.

A wooden bike.

They serve gelato in coffee. Sigh!

Apparently in Italy, marble is so plentiful that they make parking stall lines out of it! There are so many mopeds in Europe that many areas have huge sections of parking just for them.

A drain grate made out of a huge slab of marble.

My view every morning, of Nelson making me instant cappuccino in our wonderful little campsite in the woods.

Dessert in the woods - Nutella on panettone. Atsa good!!

Eating pizza. When in Rome!

Italians are horrified to learn that in Canada we have thick crust pizza with cheese in the crust and dipping sauces.

We stayed for the weekend because we thought we saw signs for some sort of alpine festival but it turned out to be an “Alpini Festa”, which is a gathering of the Alpini, men and women who fight/fought in the mountains for the military. It was happening right below where we were camping so went and ate some good food with all these people and were so impressed with their dancing that we were scared to get on the dance floor ourselves. The band played many classic Italian songs, as well as some interesting renditions of Stevie Wonder songs, and some I recognized from the movie Flashdance.

Our last day there, we finally did a ‘Via Ferrata’ which are basically scrambles or easy climbs that have had fixed cables and rebar steps put into, so that you can move more quickly and secure yourself. Originally, these were created during the war for soldiers, like the Alpini, to be able to move quickly and safely through steep exposed terrain. Now they are developed for and used by tourists, as well as for climbers to quickly approach higher climbs.

We heard from Celia that the boat is going into the water at the end of the month and that she could use our help getting it ship shape, so were heading to Croatia!

Venice sucks!

JULY 3RD - 7TH
Okay, it doesn’t really, but these words did come out of my mouth our first day there when - contrary to my expectations of a charming romantic little island city with winding streets and lone gondoliers paddling serene canals – it was jam packed with tourists (who probably expected the same and were cursing my presence as well) sweating profusely as we all jostled our way through narrow streets and paid $10 for a coffee just to be able to sit down for half an hour.

Our next two days were great, though! We saw the popular sites early in the morning or late at night when Venice is indeed very romantic and charming.

One particularly narrow street

Detail on the palace

We spent most of our daytime at the Biennale – an enormous showing of some of the best contemporary art from countries around the world.

Some of it was very interactive.
The Biennale alternates every second year between art and architecture and Nelson was a bit sad we weren’t here for the architecture year, so we vowed to come back some day for it (hopefully when he’s showing in it, and we can afford a gondola ride – over $100 for less than an hour, but very posh!).

People are incredibly fashionable in Europe, with much of the clothing being fairly impractical. Flip flop boots would be perfect for hot weather fashion though!

Pasta shop. The one in the middle top is chocolate noodles.

Nelson in his new Italian silk tie. We've coined a new term, which is "Euro hot". Him in a pink silk tie is a prime example.

Bikes at the train station. It's cool that so many people cycle commute but some may have been left a little too long!

Sunrise over Venice from our campsite.

We got engaged!!

I figured this deserved to not just be buried in my post on Montserrat - On top of Gorro Frigi (the biggest one in the photo), Nelson asked me to marry him!

I said `yes´!
Nelson went to great pains to figure out my finger size, involving friends and family across Canada. He designed the ring, and our friend Caroline made it. It´s a fire opal in silver.

I think it looks especially beautiful against my grubby hands! I guess I shouldn´t quit my day job and become a ring model (oh, wait, I already quit my day job...)

Sigh, life is good. Very good.

We´re off to Venice now, since we´ve decided to visit only the most romantic of European cities (that are nearby good climbing areas).