 |
| Byzantium ruins on the beach |
Thanks to Adam's work, we had the opportunity to visit the island Brijuni again last week. The first time we visited, we took an early ferry and walked around the island in the early spring cold before taking a short group tour on a tourist "train". This time, it was summer, and we got to stay four days in a real hotel (the Neptun) right on the water, with two balconies, and a half-board option. It felt like a real vacation.
 |
| Biking on Brijuni |
After checking in, we headed straight for the bike rental shop. Thankfully for us, Brijuni has a different biking safety philosophy than the Americans, and even the Slovenians. Because of this more laid-back attitude, we were able to stuff the almost-five-year-old Georgia into a child booster seat. If we would have been in Michigan this summer, she would be riding a two-wheeler by now, but that wasn't a reasonable goal here in Croatia with no bikes, no parking lots or flat land to learn on if we had had bikes, and no doctor-patient relationship (Adam's requirement for learning how to bike). On Brijuni, there were no helmets in sight, except the Germans in their modern eyeglasses and who were extremely conscientious and brought their children's helmets and elbow/knee pads with them. But since there are no cars allowed on the island except work vehicles, golf carts, and Tito's Cadillac, the risk of collision with a large vehicle was rather small. Our biking arrangement worked really well except that Georgia's legs were so long in the booster seat that my feet would knock her feet with every rotation. Despite that, it was still an exhilarating feeling to be back on a bike after a year, particularly in this idyllic environment.
 |
| Lucy and Tito's Cadillac |
On or first full day, when Adam was at the conference, we biked to the Roman ruins and did homeschooling and collected odd things on the beach (a weathered and bleached out jaw bone, rocks with fossils on them, and hundreds of little seashells). We biked around the island some more and ate our packed lunch on a beach, where the kids built a fort made out of rocks. We went back to the hotel and watched Nadal defeat Docovic at the French Open semifinals. Before dinner, Jonah and Adam played soccer at the hotel's park area. After a late dinner, we went to bed with our french doors open to the waves, watching all the yachts moored in the harbor bobble around. One of our disappointments (just a temporary one), was that the door to the safari park and dinosaur park seemed were locked. Back at the hotel reception, we were told that we could only get into the park if we were on the little tourist train, which we had no intention of doing again.
 |
| Underage driving |
The next day, Adam was finished with work so we rented another bike for him and continued our exploration of the island. We walked through the horticultural center which specializes in Mediterranean species, and also takes care of rare plants that Tito received from the world's non-aligned leaders who visited him on Brijuni. Then we headed over to the Byzantium Castle, a structure that was inhabited since the year 500, and used up until the 17th century. Neither of these sites were featured on the tourist train in the spring.
The Byzantium ruins are in pretty good shape, on terrific ocean-front real estate, so we homeschooled there and took our time playing in the water and on the beach. That night, we rented a golf cart and went back to the safari park area. When we pulled up to it, this time a different door than when we were on our bikes, we noticed two bikers coming out of the park. They told us that you could enter and exit by pressing a button. So we did that and cruised right into this area that was supposed to be off-limits. As it turned out, this was a different entrance (not the padlocked one we biked to earlier), and perfectly available to tourists who were not part of the train tour. We saw some of the animals at the safari park, but we headed straight to the dinosaur park, which we missed in our spring trip to Brijuni. We got out of the golf cart and walked to the beach where, sure enough, the rocks were sprinkled with the footprints of a carniverous dinosaur. We had to have the golf cart back by 8pm, so we hurried back. The next morning, we decided to take the later ferry back so we could rent bikes again and spend some more time at the dinosaur beach. The kids checked out the dinosaur footprints, but their real interest was in collecting the salt that had accumulated in the footprints and in the other crevasses along the rocky shoreline. There was a ton of salt in a deserted area about 200m north of the dinosaur prints, and a cement bunker of some sort. WWII? By the end of the morning, the kids had an entire ziplock bag full of salt crystals. We headed back to the hotel to pick up our bags, and finally, after misunderstanding the ferry timetable, we finally made it back to Istria and to the bus depot in Pula, which got us back to Rijeka.
 |
| Dino print |
 |
| Salt harvest on Brijuni |
 |
| My paludier |
 |
| George & lavender |
 |
| Unidentified flora |
 |
| Homeschooling on Roman ruins |
