pre-pre-trip

This blog is about our bike trip to Croatia.

Once again, we selected a trip organized by Vermont Bicycle Tours (VBT) because our previous experiences with them have been great.

And once again, I made the trip with Syracuse riding buddies Mike Reagan and Walter Putter. I had taken trips in 2013 to Italy with Mike plus Vince Giardina and Marty Canavan, in 2015 to France with Mike and Walter, and in 2016 to Spain with Mike and Jaime Garcia. On this year's trip, my PMC riding buddy and college roommate, Stu Koman joined Walter, Mike and me.

We decided on Croatia in part because we were looking for a different country, in part because some of the people on our tour last year recommended it as a more challenging ride and in part because the tourist industry describes Croatia as less well know but just as appealing a destination as other more popular Mediterranean countries.

With the best of intentions, I got a couple of Rick Steves' books on Croatia from our library and just got through a couple of pages. I read enough to see that it would be helpful to make a photocopy of the page of "emergency croatian" phrases. But I found the availability of youtube videos much too easy to pass up so if you want to see what I watched (and hope to see in person), here are a couple of short ones that are pretty informative:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVxZxOaEuF4

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5Buk6NPVPg

This one is a talk by a guy who works for Rick Steves so there is less video of Croatia but more talking, more like a lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGDn5kljtsI&t=2s

We spend the first three days (our "pre-trip") in Dubrovnik and it is highlighted in these videos.

We end the trip in Split and it also has a dedicated section in the videos.

The first video also has a short segment on the island of Hvar. This is where we spend the first few days of the trip actually riding bikes.