Italy Slovenia Croatia bike trip 2023
Day -1:
This year we weren't sure about a trip. Work was complicated and the kids had a number of summer activities that we thought were important to them. But when Andrew received a scholarship into the CBYX program to do his junior year of high school in Germany, we discussed it and decided as a family that we really wanted to spend the time together. So we bowed out of orchestra camps, robotics camps, kayaking camps and arrange our lives to take a month off.
Where? That was the question. There was a request to not make it totally linear, so we could see more, move around, adjust as we felt like it. Crys had read an article in Adventure Cycling about the 'Green Gourmet Route's through Slovenia. That gave us a backbone and we started planning around that. I found a bike rental place in Venice that would rent for a month. Looking at the map, a ferry went from Croatia to Ancona Italy. With that we had a skeleton of a trip!
We also decided that we wanted a very complete plan this year. Last year we felt like we were spending too much time every day arranging the next steps and stays. A few weekends of detail planning and an amazing site called cycle.travel that routes you off busy road, and we started piecing together the details. Emails and calls went out and we started making our reservation. It was a lot of work, and a lot of spreadsheet planning, but we have a month of travel by bike, train, and ferry figured out, some camping, some Airbnb's/hotels.
The outline is: land in Venice, get picked up by the bike rental person who also runs the B&B we will stay at. Get the bikes and head off the next morning northbound for a few days, take a train to northern Italy, bike over in to Slovenia, bike around the Julian alps for about 2 weeks with a few short train rides here and there, then train to Ljubliana for 2 days. A train to Rijeka and then 8 days island hoping with the bikes and ferries down the Croatia coast to Split where we will catch the ferry back to Italy and spend a few days in Venice, return the bikes and head home.
That's the plan, we will see how it all plays out!
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