The Bicycle Adventure Club - Come Ride With Us!

Historic Croatia Island Tour

June 6th to June 25th

Ride Coordinator: Warner Griswold
Report by: John Mazur

This tour was a great sampling of Croatia via many of its islands and along the coast.  Of note, our group had a pretty even split between e-bikes and “analog” bikes. Support from the tour operator was generally stellar and consisted of the owner/operator that was also a daily rider and “sweep” while his partner drove the support van with all our luggage and gave us rest stops around every 15Km.  The tour operator gave us daily pre-briefs for the next day’s ride at each day’s happy hour where we got info on the start time, ride profile, expected re-supply stops, next day’s hotel, weather, and a much-enjoyed history lesson.  On many days he also sent out, via WhatsApp, a recap of the briefing – always important and missed when it didn’t happen. 

In general, we traveled from Trieste to Dubrovnik with a number of ferry rides to connect all the stops.  We were well-supported for the ferry rides with tickets and arrival times.  Our bikes were also well taken care of for the ferry rides with sheets to protect the bikes if we needed to lean them onto each other.  The tour operator was quite conscious of the need to charge the e-bikes each night and seemed to know how to organize the bikes in the parking facilities to ensure folks were charged each day.  We never feared our bikes would be vandalized/stolen, but also had locks along.

The rides were generally around 40 miles. We changed location most days, but there were a few rest days with optional loop rides on some of them.  The rides were often moderately hilly with a few challenging hills each day - one day had an extended steep hill that caused some walking or rest breaks. The roads were in great shape – smooth and well maintained.  However, we also encountered some unexpected road construction that caused several miles of gravel riding and also had some unexpected routing through unrideable roads.  Hopefully those will be addressed for future rides.  Of note, we had some really hot days where many of the riders left early to finish before it got too hot and one day where the quote of the day was “Nobody mentioned we’d be riding on the surface of the sun today!”  Sun cover and sunscreen were important as there wasn’t much shade for many of the miles.

Croatia was mostly beautiful – I’ve never seen so many rock fences and piles in my life!  I probably drove my wife crazy remarking about the purple bougainvillea flowers and smoke bushes. Fantastic! The coastline and water were spectacular – gorgeous blue/turquoise waters.  Our guide arranged tours for some of the walled cities we visited and they were greatly appreciated.  He also arranged a sea kayak tour for many of us and again the guide was outstanding – highly recommended.  The included meals were very good, lots of seafood – btw, who eats cuttlefish?? Several of our group had specific eating requirements – gluten free, vegetarian, etc and the evening meals did a good job of supporting those needs.  I’d recommend some sort of daily menu choices (via WhatsApp perhaps) to help that process/confusion.

Accommodations were quite good, some were outstanding and some simply adequate – all were clean, good running water, beds were generally good.  One night many of us got attacked by mosquitoes in our rooms - recommend insect repellant and antihistamines.

Overall, this was a very good trip with our recommendation – Croatia is a beautiful country with outstanding roads and views and a deep history. I’d go again.