croatia – Always on Road

As you may have expected, I was late in the morning, but who cares, I am on holiday. I packed slowly everything into my drybag and into the rear box, and just left home as on any other day – say hello to the neighbors, looking at running people to the bus, but I am heading to somewhere else. 😀

I got on my MT09 and got on the motorway to reduce the time to get to Croatia.

As usual, this is not exciting at all, just we need to get through Hungary as soon as possible.

Now I am more experienced, my papers and credit card are prepared to be checked or used, so the border check was quick, and I could easily start my drive in Croatia. I get down from the motorway to see the Croatian countryside, and obviously have lunch immediately.

I arrived to Zagreb, Croatia around 5PM, and it was enough from motorway, already 350 km, therefore I just used my brand new TomTop Rider 500 to drive me to Otocac, Croatia where my Airbnb room is. It asked my how much elevation change and sinuous road I would like. Give me all you can provide.

Oh, oh.

I always used my Waze on phone for GPS, which is brilliant for most cases, but if it’s raining, using it is a pain. Waze is smart enough to suggest mostly used roads to ride, while TomTom GPS give you a single plan using all existing road. And here is the problem. TomTom engineers has different opinion about unpaved roads, than me and Waze. I disabled unpaved road, but if the road is already not asphalted, then is it unpaved or not? Never mind. The environment, the fields were beautiful, although I could not drive as fast as TomTom expected. After 1.5 hour riding on unknown roads i felt that it is getting colder by sunset, and I didn’t get closer to my host as I expected, therefore I put on my raincoat (not to become frozen) and got back to motorway.

It was dropped from 18 degree to 5 degree in 3 hours, come on! Noone and nothing can help you on a naked bike without any windshield around 5 degree, and you still have 30 km. That was my worst 30 km ever I rode, when I bought my first own Aprilia RS125 on New Years Eve 2015, it was much warmer.

I arrived to the host at 9PM, but first I couldn’t find anyone there, so I was shocked. I called them, and finally they came ove4vto the house which is a separate house with 4 apartments. How lovely host, they have already prepared me a plate of delicious welcome meal (bacon, local sausage, local cheese, etc.).