D10: Split, Croatia

Since I was awake first, I took advantage of the quiet time to do a bit of yoga and more planning for the days ahead. We ate breakfast on the river promenade, and then scheduled a boat tour in the sea outside of Split (shout out to Mom for making that happen) that was a pleasant way to spend the afternoon in the sun. The highlight of the boat trip was seeing four dolphins chasing our boat on the way back for a minute or so. The tour included wine and we were all feeling pretty good post tour.

Once back on land, we climbed to top of the bell tower located in the old part of town -- wow, what a view.

We'd scheduled a guided tour of the Diocletian Palace (more on this in a bit) in the evening but before this we stopped for wine and tapas at this olive oil focused restaurant where, for example, even the furniture and plates as well as the food were made primarily from olive trees. We learned there are 5.5 million olive trees in Croatia but only 4 million people.

Our guided tour began at the Golden Gate which was the main entrance to the palace of Diocletian, who was the first Roman emperor to retire (aka abdicate the throne) and the entire grand palace was built by 15,000 slaves over 10 years to function as his retirement home. Diocletian was a big fan of Egypt and transported two stone Sphinx from Egypt of which one remains and is over 3,400 years old. Holy cow. My parents and I ended up being the only ones who signed up for the tour so we had a 90-minute private tour.

For dinner, we took a break from traditional Croatian food to eat an Asian Fusion restaurant, my favorite kind of cuisine. Split is a hard city to visit after coming from Dubrovnik because in my opinion, Dubrovnik has better vibes… but none the less we made the most of it. We called it an early night because we'd be getting up earlier than usual to catch a ferry to the island of Hvar.