Home from Croatia

After 20-something hours of travel, we are finally home in Bishkek from our Croatian vacation. What a great time the family and I had. Loved the beaches, despite needing shoes to walk on the beach. Loved the water, with the clear views dozens of feet below us, despite the salt. Loved the race I got to do as well as the “long” point-to-point swim I did. Sadly, I could never arrange the longer 12-14km swim I was planning, but that’s ok. There’ll be plenty of time for that.

I got home and immediately turned on my computer and Garmin and uploaded my swims. Nice to see them on a map, see exactly where I swam. And as promised, here’s the first one, actually from Croatian Vacation Day #2, because the first day’s swim, for some reason, jumped all over the place as if I lost satellite reception. Anyway, as described, swim #2 in Croatia was a smidge over 3km, paralleling the beaches of Sutivan.

Croatian Vacation Day #2
Croatian Vacation Day #2

Slow, but enjoyable. Lots of little pauses to check out the scenery. A great swim really. The areas along the water that weren’t beaches included steps built into the rock walls. For this first swim, I got out at one of those stairs, making it easy to walk east past the restaurant ( the square thing creeping out into the water in the photo below) to the shower [link jpg] at the beach about 15m further east along the road. Free word of advice: Don’t forget to shower off the sea water. Few things worse than walking around in heat checking out some catacombs with your skin all itchy from the salt water.

Day 2 finish close-up
Day 2 finish close-up

What these pictures also show is the difficulty of getting a proper, accurate time and distance for your swim when you’re putting your GPS inside the SaferSwimmer dry bag. Each time, I’d have to start the watch recording, throw it in the dry bag, then wrap the bag, and walk out into the water. Reverse it on the way out. So my Croatia swims include about 10m of walking on either end as well as a few minutes added for that. I intended on wearing my swim cap and putting the watch under it, making it easy to press START/STOP (and even LAP), but it was so damn hot there the last thing I wanted or needed was my head to be wrapped in latex.

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