6/17: wheee!

Today was our first full day of riding.

VBT had mapped out all of our routes with ridewithGPS.com. It is a pretty cool web platform where you can map out the ride complete with turns and download it to your phone or garmin cycling computer.

Here is the link to today's morning ride: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/19542505?privacy_code=6Oi6n0ULpzLkmI4r

(I suspect you can not see this webpage without logging in. If that's the case, let me know and I will try to see if I can find another way to post the route.)

It didn't always work. We spent a lot of time making sure we had downloaded the routes ahead of time when we were on wifi and fiddling with the settings. It didn't help that we were all using different devices: I used my garmin 500, Walter used his fancier garmin, Stu used his phone, I am not sure what Mike used except he went with the paper version. Most of the time, it was good to have multiple methods and we still had to stop every once in a while to make sure we were making the right turns.

We started from the hotel and rode out of town. Since the hotel was on the coast, almost every ride out of town meant a climb. We pulled over every once in a while to take in the view and take pictures.

The route took us to a little town called Pucisca. Without the accents over the letters, it's pronounced Pucheeska. We had lunch there and visited a stone-cutting school.

Here's Mario explaining how things worked.

The kids who enroll in this school are high school-aged and they follow a regular curriculum in addition to learning this trade. Everything in this room is carved by hand using traditional tools. I  like to think of it as art school but where stone is the medium. When they graduate they often get jobs making tombstones or something else similarly unartistic. And while they know how to work in stone by hand, they use power tools because most jobs pay by the hour and working by hand would take five times longer than working with power tools.

School was out so we didn't get a chance to meet any students or see them in action.

The four of us ordered a pizza for lunch. Delicious, but a bad idea for a ride afterwards.

The route was essentially an out-and-back. But as is often the case, looking at the scenery from the opposite direction could easily have been an entirely new route.

We went past the hotel for a small extension to Skrip.

Here's the route for the afternoon.

https://ridewithgps.com/routes/18389700?privacy_code=JaAEkFmUgnEB9fnp

At the terminus, there was a woman who met us and didn't speak a word of English but jabbered at us in Croatian (I assume). She welcomed us to her home and took us to a room where she made and stored olive oil and brandy. She showed us an enormous stone tub of olive oil. She served us little pieces of bread to dip in a platter of olive oil and poured us small cups of home-made brandy, much like what we had at the restaurant the night before. It was pretty strong. We toasted with "jivali" and I poured the rest of mine into her raised garden bed. She had small packets of lavender for sale. I thought it would be nice to buy something from her but we later figured that VBT probably paid her something to host riders.

Here is a picture of her and a guy who was just hanging around, I assume her husband.

We explored the village which couldn't have had more than a dozen or so homes. One was a restored castle.

Here's a view of the courtyard through the front door.

One home had a traditional water containment pit.

There is no source of fresh water on the island. So residents would catch and store rain water. In modern times, fresh water is now provided by a pipeline that runs the length of the strait along the seabed from the mainland. Makes you appreciate the infrastructure that provides water.

Main street.

The town cemetery.

A museum that we didn't go to.

This looked like a nice picture. It was also off the main path so I was able to relieve myself. Needless to say, there were no municipal restrooms.

At the edge of town there was a vista with another pretty amazing view. Here is a pan of the view. The picture really does not do justice to the actual view.

When we got back to the hotel, Caryn (of Caryn and Dan) was done and I asked her I could test ride her ebike. I originally intended to just take it around the block or something similar. But I took it up the road we did for our warm-up ride and when I was done thought it would be fun to try it on some more serious hills so I took it back up the return route. When I asked Caryn to show me how it worked, she told me that they recommended keeping it on ECO to preserve battery, the lowest of five settings. Of course I turned it up to "turbo" (the highest). Walter told me that my body language as I left the parking lot was WHEEEE!

I am now a fan of ebikes. They are electric-assist bikes in that you have to put pressure on the pedals. If you stop pedaling, the motor shuts off. If you soft pedal, the motor cuts back. The bike seems to know when you need power so if you pedal hard and there is resistance such as a hill, the motor kicks in. I didn't get a chance to try it with a headwind but I imagine it works the same.

Dan, who is a CAT3 racer said that if Caryn is going up a hill, it is all he can do to stay on her wheel. They passed me the next day and there was no way I could stay with her. She calls it a game-changer. I call it fantaschino.

Here is the strava link that shows my data for the entire day: https://www.strava.com/activities/1040961713

In summary: 31.3 miles, 3271' of climbing.