Lickety Split

We left for Ancona from Stansted airport (the previous night had been spent celebrating Karen's birthday at a Chinese restaurant). To start the day, Weisie, Karen and I caught the Stansted Express (just) and buried our faces in breakfast from Burger King. We each ordered something different but somehow ended up with the same thing: two all lips'n'butt patties, special sauce (lard, lipid and clarified butter), cheese, cheese, cheese, and half an onion, on a slightly stale bun. When the train pulled into the airport we were bleary eyed and needless to say queasy. We met Dave, Em, Tim, Mel and Trish in the queue for our Ryan Air flight. Before taking off, Em bought travel insurance from Boots (don't you just love Boots) and Trish threw her passport in the bin.

Trish later retrieved her passport.

Ancona is a big, dusty port town. No-one seemed to mind that it was hot and our bags were over packed. We were all tremendously excited about our upcoming adventure. We ate some pizza in town and drank beer from 1 litre tankards. We then found our ferry and cabins, dumped our belongings and commenced drinking a lot more beer, and wine, and spirits - so much so that after a while we actually thought the iPod and portable speakers sounded like a DJ when you flicked the on-off button in time to the music...

After midnight, almost everyone went to their bed for a few hours sleep. Weisie, however, woke up at 4 am, passed Karen in the corridor, showered and packed her bag thinking that the ferry was nearly at port. When we did actually reach Split a few hours later, Weisie was most penitent and prayed often to the porcelain god for her silliness. She was finally forgiven about 8 hours later (pictured below).




Split was lovely, not that we saw much of it. Instead of sightseeing, we elected to wait in the shade of the Marina for the pizzeria to open. It was a lovely day, the sun was shining, but we were all clearly under the weather. Finally, we were shown to our floating home for the next week, the Pasha II, a 43 foot Sun Odyssey yacht. We bought supplies, met our skipper (more of him later) and set sail.