6/19: clothing optional

Today was another transfer day but VBT worked a short ride into the schedule.

Here is the route: https://ridewithgps.com/events/28928-vbt-croatia-the-dalmatian-islands#routes/18376712/preview

As you can see, it is a long downhill.

Dan did the bonus ride up to the start.

Here are his data: https://www.strava.com/activities/1043937120

Nice job, Dan.

The "highlight" of the route was a "clothing optional" beach. There are many such beaches scattered around Croatia but as our tour guides pointed out, any beach can be a clothing optional beach if you are brave enough. There was one beach a day or two later where a middle-aged woman very matter-of-factly took off her top and lay on her back to work on her tan. As one of the women in our group pointed out, she had obviously been working on her tan before.

Our tour guides said that most of the people who visit clothing optional beaches were from Germany or the nordic countries. We stopped at one clothing optional beach and decided when in Croatia, do as the Germans do. Here we are with all our garish biker tan lines.

The evening activity was billed as a cooking lesson, but actually it was more like a cooking demonstration. We walked up to the home of Ante, a guy who spent 27 years in Germany as a professional cook before he decided to move back to Croatia. He owned an apartment on the hill in town with a small open area that he used for an urban garden. He grew a wide variety of vegetables and herbs including the ingredients for grappa. So of course we began the visit with a toast.

Here he is with Mario translating although his English was actually pretty good.

Here he is in his kitchen. Don't let the open fire fool you. He had professional-level equipment.

He started with a dish Mario described as "salsha". It was a cross between a warm gazpacho and egg-drop soup. It was delicious but I didn't get a picture of it before I inhaled it all. These are the ingredients. I don't think I could replicate this dish even though the ingredients are all readily available.

The main course was grilled tuna steaks with potatoes and zucchini. The dish on the right is holding sea salt that he collects and sells. This was an interesting story and it represents a lot of hard hand labor in the heat of the summer. I bought a jar of it even though I need to watch my sodium intake.

This is Mario explaining how it gets harvested.

Even though there were four people working (cooking, plating and serving), they put me to work drizzling olive oil on everything. I got the message that it was impossible to put too much olive oil on these plates. This is what it looked like when I got done with it.

And dessert. I did not have a chance to screw this up.

Ante has a philosophy on cooking, eating and life. He summarized it with three proverbs.

1. Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are (Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin)
2. Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food (Hippocrates)
3. If you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk; if you want to be happy for a year, get married; if you want to be happy for life, have a garden and spend an hour per day in it (he claimed this is a chinese proverb but I think this is edited to fit his purposes) 

Apparently Hvar is a pretty happening place. There were lots of bars, some with live music and this one was right under out hotel. A lot of the songs were covers of things we were pretty familiar with. The music was OK, the atmosphere was fun and we were the oldest people out there. The number of young people who smoked was surprising.

Final stats: 10.4 miles, 440' of climbing.