The coffee, the bakery and a very spontaneous ferry
The next morning at seven I was standing in a kitchen that wasn’t mine, experiencing a collapse of basic services.
No coffee.
I don’t want to downplay this. The apartment had everything: stove, refrigerator, dishes, pots, an electric kettle. What it didn’t have was anything you could make coffee from. No machine, no pot, no instant, no pods, nothing.
I opened the cabinets one after another and looked behind the pots. Lisa was still in bed and commented on the situation from the next room. She whined and cursed, and she was right. I’m not quoting her.
A bakery in town solved it, one we hadn’t had in mind. We just rode off with a “let’s find something” attitude. Five minutes by motorcycle, a counter, a machine, a man who makes an espresso a little after seven that you drink standing up. The coffee was good - probably because it was coffee, in an emergency. With it a pastry, something flaky. Good, but nothing special.
South, but how far
And then we sat there, fed and awake, and still had no plan.
South - decided. How far - open. Montenegro - in theory. Dubrovnik - more likely. And between us and either lay several hundred kilometers of coast road that is beautiful but in high summer consists mostly of RVs and impatience. And after that? The same road back? On top of that there was a friend in Italy I hadn’t seen for too long, and somewhere behind that the Stelvio Pass.
It was Lisa who said it.
“What if we take the ferry to Italy?”
A pause of about eight seconds followed, in which I went through every argument against it. There weren’t any. That’s the advantage of a trip with exactly one condition - the condition was met. Everything else was a bonus, and a bonus can change.
So: ferry to Ancona.
It leaves from Split, and from Pag to Split it’s 210 kilometers. On those 210 kilometers there was: nothing. Moonscape, abandoned bungalow developments, no hotel. That day I very nearly died of the heat.
What came next was the most undignified part of the whole trip, and I’m describing it at length because everyone goes through it and nobody writes it down.
Where on earth do you get a ferry ticket in a Croatian port?
Not online, if the ferry leaves in forty minutes. Not at the terminal that looks like a terminal. There’s a building that houses a shipping line that isn’t yours. There’s a container with a sign in four languages, none of which is current anymore. There’s a counter that isn’t staffed at this hour, and a second one that is staffed but sells catamaran tickets. There are three agencies near the port, two of which do exactly what you need, and none of which you can recognize from outside.
We walked in circles in full gear at 32 degrees Celsius, a hundred meters back and forth between concrete bollards, and with every lap there were fewer minutes left. In the end a man selling cigarettes pointed us to the right door. It was a glass door in a port building, and from outside you couldn’t tell there was a ferry office behind it.
Ten minutes later we had two tickets.
No cabin.
Deck instead of a cabin
Cabins are booked by people who plan. We hadn’t planned. We had deck. Open air, a lounge chair if you’re quick, the floor if you’re not, a whole night across the Adriatic.
At the moment I bought the tickets I considered that an acceptable compromise. At three in the morning I had a different opinion.
Riding onto the car deck was my first time. Steel ramp, oily surface, incline, a man with hand signals from a foreign language family. The ferry crew lashed the bike down, and there was nothing to complain about.
The evening on deck was lovely. Really. Warm, a breeze, the lights of the coast getting smaller. Two loungers between loud families with children, and at some point we fell asleep.
The night was less lovely. We slept on deck until three. Then it got too cold and too wet, and we moved inside, to the lobby, onto the floor.
Day 4 in numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Distance | 210 km, plus the night ferry |
| From - to | Island of Pag - Split, in the evening by ferry to Ancona |
| Passes and elevation | Inland road, no pass |
| Countries | Croatia, at sea toward Italy overnight |
| Ferry | Split - Ancona, deck without a cabin |
| Overnight | On deck until three, then on the lobby floor |