March 23rd, 2007 | categorizilation: all categories,Croatia
Right it’s all on. Tomorrow will be the big day. The weather has done a complete turn around, and if I was a good 80’s NZ man, I’d be in my stubbies (watch this short video clip to become enlightened in the way of the stubbie). Didn’t you wear stubbies at one stage, Dad?
Anyway, I will be out of here tomorrow. It has been a resting time (again) here in Makarska, and it is time to hit the road.
And for some reason I have more photos of dogs from Makarska than I do of people…
     
     
The mini-pug pooch in the top photo would have fit in the mouth of the maxi-pooch in the bottom four photos with ease.
The dog at bottom is an Argentinian Mastiff (info). A massive, powerful dog. In Turkey, packs of up to three or four of dogs like this would chase me. Not fun. But this pooch was super friendly, and just loved to lick any skin that got close enough. The owner was a responsible owner however, carrying a muzzle. At one stage during our chat, he put the muzzle on the dog when another dog owner walking his dog came over. And just as well. The two dogs didn’t get on too well, resulting in some ferocious barking. After the other dog had left, the Mastiff was all happy again.
Which would I choose? The mini-pooch or the maxi-pooch?
Considering maintenance, the rug rat has my vote.
Hi Rob,
I think you're coming along quite well with dogs. In the flickr pictue archive I've even seen you with 3 cats – hadn't seen that picture on the normal homepage.
Reminding me on my own dog here are some pics of it and some preview of the landscape you'll get into in Switzerland from our (my mother and me) last year summer hiking trip:
http://web.mac.com/martina.lang/iWeb/Additive%20B…
The .Mac-site is a bit slow, though 
Greetings and have a good restart tomorrow!
BTW: Are you still sleeping in the bicycling club rooms?
BTW2: If you look carefully at the pictures you can see that hiking is not my normal form of mobility 
– the bottles are all mine *g*
Daniel, I am still sleeping in the club rooms. They have a shower and toilet, and a nice comfy couch! As for the photos you didn't see on in the blog posts, there are often photos that don't make it into the blog posts, but are still on my flickr pages. You can however see all the photos I ever upload by checking the Photo Gallery every now and then.
Great photos of your hike by the way. Amazing green colours. In spring, I assume?
If Neil's Mac site is slow, it is probably because he has a hosting provider in New Zealand. NZ internet is still very behind the times. Expensive, and you can't get much over 2Mb per second for broadband.
Or perhaps it is changing now? Can a NZ reader let me know the latest in broadband internet developments there in NZ?
I've experienced that slowness on many .Mac account sites. It's a shame that you pay that much muney for that a bad service (it's never going faster than 50kb/sec and my mother pays abut 99€/yr for the .Mac account)
Rob – .mac is run by Apple Inc, not me.
All mine are rocket propelled inter continental whizz bang servers based in the US, Europe and Oz… and certainly not slow!!! 
… don't go sayin things like that… you will ruin me!!
LOL.
nmac.
Hello Jollynut,
Maybe my mail got lost, so here is just the pics proposal.
http://www.travelbilder.de/kroatien/reisebericht_…
Cheers, Akimoto
Dad certainly wore those ultra fashionable items of clothing – stubbies! They were considered so much sexier looking than the just-above-the-knee, baggy shorts that had been in fashion up til then. If you've seen pics of men in army shorts circa early 1900's you'll know what I mean. The modern long shorts are similar but so much smarter not being so baggy – unless of course they are worn with the crutch down to the knees!
Regarding NZ Broadband. According the stats, our broadband with Telstra-Clear is 54MBps. Not sure if it does that in reality. It all depends on whether the phone line is underground (=new fibre optics, so fast) or overhead (=slower). When our new house is built I expect we'll have a better speed as the cables will be new.
@Rob's Mum:
Will the house be a passive house (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house)?
Hi Rob,
Just stumbled onto your site via YouTube. My Japanese girlfriend was amazed at your proficiency in her language. How long were you living there?
I also have a recumbent (M5 Shockproof) but haven't done a great deal of touring on it. I tend to take a conventional bike most of the time as I'm a wuss on the hills. What are your feelings about touring on a recumbent now that you've done a fair few kays? Any regrets? Quitely swearing to yourself up the side of mountains?
Cheers
Andrew
Andrew, absolutely no regrets on the recumbent to get me across the continent. Now that I have lightened my gear, I am loving it. My average speeds are no different from any other long distance cyclist that I know, so even if I am slower up the hills, the flats make up for it. Certainly no swearing to myself up the hills though. If you do end up going for an M5 ShockProof, go for a 9 hour ride one day. That was my longest day, and I was still keen for more. Recumbents are comfortable. They're fast. The're safe. You'll never look back.
Eh, as I got my Streetmachine GT (recumbent) about a year ago I wanted to know how far I could get with it, even though my specific muscles for recumbent cycling (the same as for joggin, btw) were not trained. So I took off early in the morning (3am) and cycled for about 16 to 17 hours. At the end of the day the speedometer showed 340km!
That was amazing! I had never done that before with an upright. My longest distance with my MTB were about 220km (with trailer).
The downside of the medal was that I couldn't sleep for the night because I felt a heart-beat pricking through the whole night.
What did I learn from that? You have to slowly train for longer distances. My average training trip was only about 2 or 3 hours a day.
I believe that in the future there'll be far more recumbent randonneurs taking part in brevets all around the world.
Daniel, 17 hours. That's insane. Great story though. Insane, but great story.
That wasn't the whole story about my long distance attempt, though. On the last 50km (quite hilly ones) one of my gear cables of the Rohloff Speedhub broke. The other one (there are two on the Speedhub 500/14) was still intact. So I could only shift into smaller gears, to get to the higher ones I had to stop and pull on the cables directly on the hub.
And finally my friend who's training with me on a daily basis joined me on the last 15km – like an escort. Because of the broken gear cable we were not that fast, but it was a great feeling nonetheless
@Rob: BTW: It's funny to see how you cycle through time zones but the timestamps on the comments stay in the same
Hi Rob
I was see you on Croatian national TV, today. Maybe you was see too…
I hope that you will turn left in Rijeka and enter in Istra
Hi Rob, I don't know which software you use to upload your flickr pictures, but I've been searching for one and found something really interesing: jUploader (http://juploadr.sourceforge.net/) – multiplatform, automatic resizing, tagging, …
HELLO! you alive! been away from the coal face and you've not updated your site in a week or so…..
I hope Rob didn't read this site before going onto the rails
http://rrbike.freeservers.com/Railbikes_and_Railb…
Baku managed to get the prize for least sanitary city in the world. http://www.mercerhr.com/summary.jhtml?idContent=1…
