[OnyxCougar]

We continued walking along the shore, on the rocks, and I'm proud to report we didn't fall once. My ankles were starting to ache, so we decided to pack it in, and go back to the flat. We walked up a pier to some people's house, and Ivan was freaking out because we were trespassing. I told him, "Look. If the owners freak out and call the police because we are walking through their NON fenced, NON posted back yard, just let me do all the talking. We'll act like stupid American tourists." He thought about that for a minute and nodded, "OK." So we walked to the front of the house and found the alley that conncted us to the street we had walked up to get to the shore. Turns out we hadn't really walked as far along the beach as we had thought. Back up the damn hill to the flat, and Kelle and Hrvoje were just waking up. We discussed options for going back to Zagreb. Did we want to stay another night or leave today?

I looked down at my arms, hand and ankle, all of which had big red blotches where the mosquitos had feasted on me. In addition, I had 2 bites on my left ankle that I think a spider had a snack, too. Must have felt left out. I looked up at Kelle and voted, "today". Ivan also voted for today, mostly because he wanted to go see a movie. Then I found out that the ferry didn't leave until 5:30 that night, and the train didn't leave for Knin/Zagreb until 9pm. Hell yeah, I wanted to leave today!! We were blowing another day in travel.

We started repacking everything, and got everything together. By the time we locked everything up and headed out, it was past 1pm, and it looked like more clouds were on the way in. We walked past the church and looked in the yard. Flowers were EVERYwhere, remnants of all saint's and all soul's days. Kelle noted that all the flowers sat on the top of the graves, and there were lots of flowers on the entrance and entryway to the church itself. "Wait a minute! I thought you aren't supposed to walk on the graves on the dead! I thought that was like, bad luck or something." We stopped and discussed it for a moment. Both the boys are Catholic, and neither of them knew what the deal was with that. I've looked on the internet, and asked people at work, and no one knows where that originated from, but it seems to be a global respect thing. Just seems weird to me to bury people underneath the floor of the cathedrals, like in Westminster Abbey, or in the churchyard on the way from the gate to the door.

We got to the main road to Preko, and looked around. No one knew when the bus came by to take us to Preko, so we discussed waiting at the stop versus walking to Preko. It was about 3pm, partly cloudy, actually a very beautiful day, and we decided to walk it. Hrvoje carried Kelle's 2 big bags and her backpack. Ivan put my backpack on and pulled my suitcase behind us (thank gods that thing had wheels). We started out down the road to Preko, then turned off the road and walked along the coast. There is a street that followed the coastline, and as we turned a corner, there was a "fountain" (for lack of a better word), with a statue of a woman washing clothes. Now, Ugljan doesn't have desalinization plants, so the people of the island collect rainwater to drink and bathe and wash their clothes in. Apperantly, this is the place that the women of this village used to gather and wash their clothes in the rainwater that had collected in the fountain.

We eventually worked our way around to Preko, and bought the ferry tickets back to Zadar. It was 4:30, and we had an hour to kill before we needed to board the ferry. We sat in front of the restaurant/bar/ticket place, on the steps. One of the things I found irritating about Croatia was that most restaurants have outdoor seating. Basically, the inside is so small that they put the tables and chairs outside. Sometimes there are canopies or umbrellas or awnings, but they are still outside. Now here is the thing: You have been walking all day and your feet hurt. Here are about fifty tables sitting outside these 2 or 3 restaurants and you can't sit there. Why? Because if you sit down, you wanna buy something. So you can't sit at any of these 200 chairs just because you're tired. I hated that. So we sat on the steps, about 6 feet from the tables and chairs. I was seriously considering buying a damn hot chocolate just so we could sit at the table. The clouds were rolling in again, and it was getting chilly. A hot chocolate would have gone down real nice right about then. But I was comfortable on my little ledge, and we were all talking and none of us really had the energy to move. So we didn't.