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| Lubenice beach (the small white crescent in the middle of the photo) |
With only two weeks left of our adventure in Croatia, Adam and I are making a concerted effort to to tick the must-do items off our list. Earlier in the week, we went to Trieste to take care of some logistics (buying train tickets to Lucca, finding a poster tube which was completely unpurchaseable in Rijeka, and other things that involved no sightseeing). But the next day, we went back to Lubinice in Cres Island and had a proper adventure that involved getting the entire family lost in the middle of nowhere on a hot summer day with hardly any water.
We had already seen the Lubenice village when my parents visited in late April. Back in the spring, looking down the cliff, we caught our first glimpse of the beach that some people refer to as the most beautiful beach in the Adriatic. From that moment, Adam had that beach on our Croatia bucket list. In the car on the way there, we were trying to prepare the kids for the grueling hour-long hike down to the beach, and we told them that the first person in our group needed to watch out for snakes. Jonah immediately yelled, “I call first!” Then Georgie quietly said, “I call the car.”
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| On the trail |
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| Waiting for water |
We made it to Lubenice on the narrow windy roads that are technically two lanes (only because of the occasional shoulder that is necessary for two cars to squeeze by each other), got parked, found the trail entrance, and headed down. Because of the cliff, we knew the trail would have to veer to the south (away from the beach) before curving to the beach. At first, we saw a couple red arrows indicating the way to the beach, but after awhile, we stopped seeing them and just followed our bounding children, who, after all, were on a fairly well-groomed trail. However, almost 90 minutes later (completely downhill), the trail seemed to end, and we were as far away as ever from the beach. Furthermore, we hadn’t seen a soul, coming or going, in over an hour. We knew that most people wouldn’t want to undergo such a steep hike on a hot day, but in high season, you can almost always count on a few fellow crazy people. And we were enjoying the hike. There were really fragrant herbs scattered on the ground -- a kind of sage, a kind of wild rosemary, and a kind of oregano -- and the air was regularly perfumed with these plants. The terrain was all over the map -- foresty, rocky, mountainy, meadowy, gentle, steep -- but it was always beautiful and always changing, with the ocean nearly always in the background. At this point, with the sun high in the sky and our water supply precariously low, we decided to head back and see where we went wrong. The idea of giving up was eating Adam alive. And Jonah, too.
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| BWGL (before we got lost) |
We hiked back uphill for about an hour and found the point where we made the wrong turn. We made the decision to continue on to the beach, even though we had already been hiking for almost three hours. Since our water was gone, Adam volunteered to trek back to Lubenice and buy water. The kids played in the shade and we occasionally saw a lone white shirt through the trees on the ridge leading up to the village. Adam made it back with three liters of water (if any of you are thinking that three liters of water for five people on a grueling hike in the hot midday sun isn’t enough, you are the better Boy Scout), and we spent the next hour hiking downhill, following the red arrows, until we made it to the beach.
We nearly got lost twice, and that would have been catastrophic since the area was massive and almost completely deserted. But we stuck to the red arrows and made it back in about 1 hour and 50 minutes, completely uphill with three young kids.
One of the most amazing discoveries on this trip was that our kids actually function quite well in hardship circumstances. There was no fighting, no complaining, and no whining the entire time. Yes, the girls asked for occasional rests when we could find patches of shade, and Adam ended up carrying Georgia on his shoulders for some of the way, but overall, all three of them were completely amazing. You would have been impressed, too.
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| The ice cream reward (they had their pick of the freezer) |
