The weather this morning was again picture perfect. Today we would ride from the city of Hvar, to the other end of the island where we would take a ferry back over to the mainland.
Taking the ferry with a lot of bikers
The ride across the island was beautiful with lots of twisty roads, and great views along the way. The ferry ride across was only about 30 minutes and gave us a nice break off the bikes. After that, we headed north on the coast to Biokovo National Park. We had no idea what the park was about but it was on the itinerary that Almir gave us when we arrived, so we thought it must be worth checking out.
After about a half hour, coastal ride, the road to the park took us up, switchbacks along a steep hill before arriving at the park gate. After buying a couple of tickets, they let us through the gate. The road continue to climb and after about 30 minutes of climbing, we were thinking, where is the park? Well… It turned out that the road climbing the mountain, was the park!
I’ll tell you, we thought the road would never end. The further up where we went the narrower the road became. There were almost no guard rails, and some stretches had sheer drops of 500 feet or more! I could only compare it to the Mount Washington auto road. Denise and I have taken our motorcycles up my Washington many times over the years, but this was scaring the hell out of us 😳.
These switchbacks are just a few of what we did and does not show you how steep either 😧
It took us over an hour to reach the top, and by then our knuckles were white, and we were both shaking from the intensity of the ride. Holy shit it was scary. WTF… what were we thinking! It turns out it’s the highest point in all of Croatia at 1762 meter…or 5780 feet…just a little over a mile high.
We spent about 15 minutes at the top getting a few pictures and collecting ourselves. We sure weren’t looking forward to the ride down, but we were at the halfway point before we knew it. We stopped to see the sky walk that had recently been built there.
Like we weren’t already shaky enough, getting out on the skywalk didn’t help any.
Great views but man made even me a little queasy
Don’t look down yikes….hey Dale is that a crack I see😳
The views were beautiful so we spent a little time taking it all in before heading down the rest of the way.
Our destination for tonight was the small city of Ston about 70 miles north of Dubrovnik. We arrived there around 5:30 both pretty exhausted. We were a little disappointed that there wasn’t someplace close by to take a swim but considering how tired we were it was fine.
The rooms were owned by a local lady named Sanja. She had a restaurant on the ground floor with newly renovated rooms upstairs. We love staying in places like this when we are in Spain or Germany. They are very common there. It turns out the building was originally owned by her great grandmother, and had been passed down through generations to her. She was very sweet and showed us to our room and filled us in on the local area.
Sanja’s family Crest
Oysters in Ston… yummm
Tomorrow we have just a one hour ride into Dubrovnik. We hear the city is really beautiful and we were able to get an apartment right in the old city. We are really looking forward to spending the day there. Maybe there will be a great swimming hole! 🤞
