Making Lemonade out of Lemons

We've had a terrific, hot, sunny week in Marina Kremik and surrounding towns - Split, Primosten (pronounced "pree-mo-shten"), Sibenik (pronounced "shee-ben-eek"), and even a lovely town called Marina. The boat is mostly outfitted with what we needed (linens, kitchen supplies, buckets, scrubbers, etc. - still working on a dinghy and outboard but that's coming). What is strange is that no one BBQs here and thus the BBQ for the boat is almost $900...ouch! We'll wait on that one. So...we're ready to go...but, the lemon. The boat has to go through an export procedure before we can sail her around and because the government official in charge of this took sick leave (for 2 months!), it hasn't been done. They don't fill in jobs here...things just pile up. The previous owner is a charter company so today (or tomorrow) we will get a nice 38 foot catamaran on loan (free of charge) to go exploring until our boat is ready. Hopefully just a couple of weeks.

The food here is amazing! We can't believe how good it is and pizza and pasta are two things they do best. Jessie's palate is taken care of. Prices are very reasonable so we've explored several restaraunts and tried many things. Matt's and Ross' favourite lunch is "street meat" - (I can't remember the Croatian name for it) but it's 2 inch ground meat sausages, 5 or 6 of them, in an extra large kaiser type bun with sauce and onions...for about $4.

We had an amazing meal of local fish thanks to my "Danish Family". I studied in Copenhagen for a term of UBC many, many moons ago, and lived with Hanne and Henning in Denmark while there. They have remained distant friends and coincidentally Henning has a cousin that lives in Split. So they came to visit and took us for dinner. We had a really lovely evening and even celebrated Hanne's birthday with a very loud Happy Birthday song and yummy cake.

The only not so good meal was in a National Park - lots of tourists and they tried to meet the needs of tourists (offering hamburgers) and they failed. Better to stick to local cuisine. The park though was gorgeous - called Krka. We spent about 4 hours walking the trails and Jessie and I went swimming.

Last night we made friends with a young Swiss couple berthed next door - stayed on deck until after 1 am. Matt, David and Irene enjoyed a "digestive" (pronounced "di-jes-teef") of plum schnapps...and David came over this morning with aspirin for Matt. :-)

Next up we hope to share some actual sailing adventures...stay tuned!