Our friend Mirena is Croatian and maintains a family house on the beach in Gradac, a small town about halfway between Split and Dubrovnik. Her uncle Braco (pronounced BRA tso) is starting a tour business that he is calling Mala Groupa (small group) and asked Mirena to put together a group of friends who could be a beta test for the tour. So we joined Mirena and Win and 7 other people for 9 days in Croatia.

[Note that the tour is now called Backdoor Tours Croatia. Link to their Facebook page.]

We will sleep in Gradac for the entire time. We are spread across 3 houses that are side by side (one is Mirena and Win's and we are at Vila Amalia) on the beach. They have a variety of day trips planned for about 7 of the days and some combination of relaxing and personal touring the other 2 days.

Day 1 was actually a day and a half. We left on Wednesday, June 14 from Boston. We flew Lufthansa to Munich and arrived in Munich around 9:30 AM. We flew on Croatia airlines from Munich to Split (about a 60 minute flight), arriving around 3:30 in Split. Win and Braco drove up from Gradac (about a 90 minute drive). Win drove us back to Gradac while Braco stayed at the airport, rented a large van for the week, and waited for the rest of the crew to come in a few hours later. So we got to Gradac about 5:30. The following map provides some context for the location of Gradac.

You can see that Gradac is in the middle of the Dalmatian coast roughly halfway between Split (to the north) and Dubrovnik (to the south). (Dubrovnik is not named on this map but it is almost at the Montenegro border).

We got settled into our little apartment (bedroom, bathroom, outside patio, shared kitchen), relaxed for a while and went over and had drinks and some nibbles with Win and Mirena. The rest of the crew showed up around 9 and we all went to an open air restaurant on the beach in front of our apartment, called Malo More ("small sea"), for some dinner. (We had squid and potatoes and cabbage salad, and wine, of course).

Mountains behind.

Sea and sunset in front.

Day 1 ended after dinner around 11 PM and we fell asleep pretty quickly.