So Ante's house is just awesome :-) It's a family home, built by his grandfather some 30 or 40 years ago. It's something like 5 bedrooms, and actually 3 separate apartments, so there was plenty of room for the 3 of us.
Besides being one of the best Ubuntu High Availability/Clustering experts in the business, Ante also owns a small Croatian tourism company called Jamming Adventures which specializes in kayaking and adventure sports along Croatia's Dalmatian Coast. He's in the process of renovating parts of the house to use the spare apartments as guest accommodations.
Parts of the house had a somewhat craftsman style to it. Kim found it all really quite charming :-)
But the views are second to none! From the third story, you can see much of the island, including the water on both sides. Unfortunately, we didn't have much sun when we took these pictures, but rest assured the colors are in fact spectacular.
The island of Murter consists of about 5 or 6 different small towns, each with their own port and multiple churches.
I counted about one church per capita on the island ;-) Most of them are several centuries old.
We rented a very small car from Hertz for the week. This is our Opel Corsa by General Motors. It had 20 kilometers on it when we started the week, and over 1600 kilometers (1000 miles) by the time we dropped it back off at the airport. Gasoline was over $8/gallon. Ouch.
At the top of the hill, we had sweeping views of the entire island, her constituent cities, and even Ante's house.
Each of the towns are easily identified by their tallest church's steeple.
This was a great way to orient ourselves with our home base for the week.
We are so appreciative of our host, Ante, who's passion about Croatia and Murter are always evident. Note to self: it's awesome to visit a country and stay with a host who owns a tourism company :-)
The island of Murter itself has been continuously inhabited since at least 100 a.d., when the Romans under Trajan founded the city and palace of Colentum. Today, the island's largest hotel goes by the same name. We visited the ruins of Colentum on Monday (see the next post).
We walked from the top of the hill back down to the beach, and a ways around the island. We learned so much from our gracious host.
A familiar site, it was fun seeing the same agave we have in our yard in Austin, growing here on the shores of the Adriatic Sea.
I'm not sure what these flowers are, but they looked something like a purple daisy, growing from a succulent.
We walked from beach to beach, and saw a few families out enjoying the lovely seascapes. We watched intently as this guy made a sailboat out of a deteriorating piece of Styrofoam. And yes, it sailed :-)
Ante apologies endlessly (and needlessly) about the weather. May is a little too early to expect summer conditions on the Dalmatian islands. July and August, evidently, are the peak of the tourist season.
But with the absence of summer weather there was also a total absence of other tourists. We more or less had the island to ourselves!
Walking up over the hill, back toward Ante's house, we stopped to try and capture the moment. This was an ancient place, with hundreds of kilometers of stone walls and Roman ruins two millennia old. Wow.
It's pretty cool to have all of this, in your back yard!
That evening, we said goodbye to Ante for a bit, as he drove back to Zagreb. He was speaking at an open source conference there on Monday. We were on our own for dinner, so we went into the center of the town of Murter.
With it raining, we didn't walk around much, but we did dip into the first eatery we found, a pizza place called Mareta.
We sipped on inexpensive, local wine and had an outstanding pizza, topped with the local delicacy, a smoked ham similar to prosciutto. For dessert, we thought we were getting hazelnut gelato, but it wasn't quite as cold as ice cream, and had a bit more of a hazelnut cream cheese flavor.
In any case, it was delicious!
Ah, and of course, the locals have their own sweet dessert wine, too. I've forgotten the name of it, but it reminded me of Sciacchetrà from Cinque Terre, Italy.
On the way down the stairs and out of the restaurant, we noticed the dramatic display case in the base landing stair. Tucked below this class are a couple of ancient Roman wine vessels discovered in the harbor just in front of the restaurant. Wow.
I tried to line up a SCUBA diving trip, as it would have been pretty awesome to see something like this! Unfortunately, the weather wasn't conducive to diving, and again, the tourist season hadn't really opened.
The rain really started coming down as we left dinner and headed back to Ante's house for the night. Godfather II was the only thing on TV in English (with subtitles in Croatia), and we stayed up way too late watching that :-)
:-Dustin
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