Korcula.  Were I a less lazy man, I would put the little hat on the ‘c’- it’s an affricate, but not the affricate that you think it is.  Well, you probably don’t think it’s an affricate, or don’t care, or like, whatever, but the point is that I am lazy and the ‘c’ should be wearing some sort of a hat.

Zadar is the cool surprisingly partying city we boated and bused into, which we then left to go to Split.  So we could take a ferry to the island that needs a hat.  So that’s what happened.  I mentioned earlier that there was a big festival going on in split- ULTRA- and that knowledge is very important in evaluating the city.  Basically, it was a terrible, terrible experience. A neat old town with the charm of Las Vegas (Side note: I hate Las Vegas and do not find it charming).  It was totally totally packed with people.  It’s like how I imagine those MTV spring break places are like in all the time the cameras aren’t rolling.

Here’s how much I didn’t like Split: Ever since I realized I was going to a town called Split, I had planned on taking a picture of a banana once I was there and coming up with something hilarious to say about it.  When I got to Split, I was in no mood for joking.  I just wanted to leave.  BUT, as I found out later, the festival drew approximately 5x as many people as as usually there in the high season, and it’s usually pretty busy in the high season.  So the point is that Split is probably pretty nice, but not when there’s a giant music festival.

So anyhow, enough negativity.  We actually had a pretty decent time there.  We got off our bus and fought through the crowds, but we successfully did all the errands we needed to do, including buying two days of groceries (peanut butter!) a new bathing suit, and.  um..  money, maybe?  I forget, but there was a third thing.  We did it all, then we got onto a boat and went to Korcula!

The ferry to Korcula, fwiw, wasn’t the big cool party ferry I was used to, but pretty much just a floating bus:

So we took a boat, maybe an hour and change, to Korcula, where our host met us at the port.  The house was a summer home for their family for years, but they decided recently to start renting it out and we were the first customers. The host was the older daughter of teh family, in her early 20s, I think, and she was pretty nervous about us liking the place and telling us all we had to know, and I think a little wary of the idea of strangers living in her family cottage.  Anyhow, she was great and went with us to the house to walk us through everything.

The house was awesome.  Not super elaborate, but clean and nice and with a view of the bay from the terrace.  (The really great shot that sold the house to us was actually taken from the path leading away from the house, not the terrace, but we brilliantly discovered that if we moved a table from the terrace to the path, then.  um..  we win.)

A little rocky beach was about a two minute walk away, which we took advantage of pretty much immediately.  The water was completely full of sea urchins, so bringing our water shoes proved crucial.  But the water was super duper clear and awesome and that’s pretty much that.  The next day we woke up, ate some some eggs and drank some instant coffee, and then went down to the beach and proceeded to swim and sun for the entire day.

Except not quite.  We were committed to spending our time there at the water, but the sky wasn’t cooperating.  It was a little drizzly and cloudy but not quite cold.  I spent a big chunk of time photographing the one patch of blue sky, trying to determine whether it was changing at all in size.  Eventually, we gave up on it being a sunny day at the beach and just decided to swim in cloudy drizzle.  Upon making this decision, the clouds parted and we were rewarded.

So once in the water, we could only float on our backs and swim in circles for so long, so we decided to swim across the bay to an island where we heard there was a church with a bell you could ring!  We love ringing bells!  So we made the swim, but we couldn’t find the church, so then we swam to another island, where we also couldn’t find the church.  There weren’t any other islands, so we never found the church, but it was still an awesome swim.  Also, we swam to two islands!   For real!

Anyhow, that pretty much wrapped it up.  It rained like crazy the next morning, so no more swimming, but I stood in the rain in my bathing suit, which is basically the same thing.  We considered staying for an extra few days, but Dubrovnik was calling us, and for all we knew, it could be way better than a secluded cottage on a crystal clear bay.  Right, that’s gonna happen.