The Adventure Begins

Split

After what seemed like an endless day of flying, we arrived in Split at 6 PM Thursday. There were a lot of unknowns along the way… the big one being that we discovered my ticket from Air Canada didn’t include my middle name, but my passport suggesting the two travel documents don’t match. I spent a lot of time on hold with Air Canada who said it was not a big deal as long as the first and last name match exactly. The problem was that Air Canada had farmed the flight out to Lufthansa. I called Lufthansa and they said actually, we do care and you have to get to the airport and change it before you can check in. This set off a comedy of events in which we caught an even earlier ferry over to Vancouver to ensure that everything got fixed up in time for our dinner time flight. On arrival around 1 PM, I explain to the agent, I’ve been told this is a problem and this needs to be fixed before I can travel. He tells he doesn’t care and by the way, you’re here awfully early, aren’t you?
The next hurdle was the new EES European Union system that was gonna require we scan passports, take a picture, and do our fingerprints when landing in Munich. Our fear was, with all the holdups being posted online, would we catch our next flight with only a 1:40 layover. As it turned out, the machines were not great and mine did scan my passport, but didn’t take a picture or my fingerprints but Colin actually went through perfectly. Next stop was the border agent who took a bored look, didn’t say much but at last did the finger print and photo. Pretty happy that we got to the gate with time to spare before the hour flight from Munich to Croatia.
Landing in Split was an experience it itself. The plane came to a stop on the runway near the terminal and out came the stairs. None of the workers had ear protection and very little crowd control. We just wandered all over the area, passing nearby a fuelling plane with little direction. Then a huge plane started take off one runway over as we were right there. Safety seems a little lax for sure.

We caught the bus downtown and found ourselves in one of the biggest holiday event events in Split, a festival for the patron saint of split, St Domnius. A band was playing, vendors were everywhere plus they had this high stakes bingo event. Everyone had this small ticked where scraped off numbers as they were called out. It was so crowded in places we got pushed around in these crowd surges. I overheard someone say that last night was the one time a year there are more locals than tourists downtown. It definitely was a locals event.

Jet lagged and needing to eat, we dropped our luggage and ventured out again to find something for dinner and then back home by 9 o’clock. We both ended up sleeping about 10 hours straight through and woke up this morning ready to start our adventure.

Today was just about having a wander around and checking out the sites. We are situated just on the edge of the old town and there are lots of alleyways, castles and ruins where you could easily get lost with one wrong turn.

Tonight starts the international regatta, world rowing championship for university teams. Last night’s stage is being reset for some sort of rock band. It also explains all the young dudes we saw buying beer today.

Tomorrow we have the morning in town and then we’ll board the boat to start the cycling part of the trip.