Sardinia, Croatia, Romania and Budapest Summer 2004

In the summer of 2004, Christos and Lisa had their last sail on the wonderful Elifithiria with Alex and Sally.

We flew into Italy for a brief trip over to Sardinia where Christos went on a mining site visit before heading to Croatia where we met Alex and Sally. Two glorious weeks were spent sailing the Dalmatian Coast with visits to the island of Dugi Otok and the ports of Zadar and Split as well as other smaller ports. Croatia is quite a beautiful country and although not as expensive as Italy or France, by 2004 it had been discovered as a tourist destination and prices, while reasonable, were certainly not cheap.

The stay at Dugi Otok was particularly memorable. It is an island off the coast of Croatia:

https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Dugi+otok,+Croatia/@44.021175,15.0226648,11z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x47620015c670e1df:0xf5623705331cee03

With a natural park (Park Prirode Telascica) at the southern end that has a long bay leading into it providing excellent shelter. The bay is popular with yachties and has one restaurant grandfathered in but is otherwise devoid of settlements.

The restaurant is excellent and their specialty is a lamb dish that they cook slowly buried underground; one needs to order it in the morning in order to get it for dinner that night!

There is a dirt road over the hills and out of the bay that leads to the town of Sali on the exterior coast; Lisa and Christos paid it a visit by hitching a lift in the back of a truck and then walking back.

While in Croatia, we also did some spelunking although for the life of me I cannot recall the name of the cave we visited.


After the sailing with Alex and Sally, we left for an overland voyage to Romania where Christos had another mining site visit planned to the Rosia Montana project.

After a harrowing 24 hour trip by bus and train, we arrived in Romania in the early hours and were picked up by their local guy (Adrian) who not only chaperoned us for the tour but also took us on a three day weekend tour of Romania after the site visit was complete.

It was a real eye opener for both of us as out expectations and preconceptions as to what Romania is were way off.

The mine tour itself was very interesting as the project has a long history (2000 years) starting with the Romans and ending after the Ceausescu era when subsides were removed and the operation could not operate economically. An old rusted "shovel" from the Ceausescu era remained as a monument to previous times.

While touring Romania with Adrian, Christos spied two vampiric wooden carvings that he quite liked and before he could buy them, Adrian purchased them for us! They have graced our walls ever since and are known as "Vlad and Adrian".