Campgrounds and Bunkers and TikTok - Oh, My!
Saturday was a beautiful day and I went for a long walk in the afternoon, exploring some new territory southwest of town. West of town is the archeological park. Southwest of town is the beach and a longer peninsula with a big campground and a forest park. I wasn't planning to walk around the whole peninsula - I just wanted to walk down to the beach and sit and do some work on my laptop. But there wasn't anywhere to sit that had any kind of table except the beach bar, and it was a beautiful day, so after trying to work with my laptop balanced on my lap for a while, I decided to venture on and explore, instead. Even then, I wasn't planning to circumnavigate the peninsula. But I did.
The beach!
It was a nice walk. The campground takes up most of the space, but it's open access and grassy and full of tall, well-pruned pines and the coastline is rocky and the sun was low enough to cast some color over the landscape. At the tip of the peninsula is the Kašteja Forest Park, a round bit of land that very obviously used to be an island. I debated walking around it and decided I might as well, since I was there - next time I decide to go that far, I'll be riding my bike.
View of the campground.
Rocky shoreline.
There weren't a ton of people around, but I did cross paths with a few; mostly couples enjoying a rest or a picnic off the path on the rocks near the water, their bicycles propped in designated cutouts in the path. I saw two different couples walking dogs, and three or four individuals on bikes. But relatively early on in the park, I came across a man filming himself, with his phone on a tall tripod and his bike parked nearby but out of frame, the water and the mainland in the background. He was doing a little dance to some music coming from his phone.
Ah, I thought. An influencer - or a would-be influencer. Huh.
It's surprising, really, that I haven't encountered an influencer in the wild before. I don't make very many videos, myself, while out and about, and although I occasionally post to YouTube, I do so to share the videos with family and friends (and yes, anyone else who might stumble upon it), and so that I can save them while deleting them from my phone so I don't have to pay for additional storage. I do think about having a "real" YouTube channel where I talk about writing and books, but I can't imagine myself making what was clearly one of those TikTok dance trend videos - that's just not me. But I respect the gig and it was somewhat entertaining to watch, so I waited quietly for him to finish before walking by so as not to ruin his take and force him to start over. It didn't take long - I think these things are usually 30-60 seconds - and I was on my way.
The funny thing to me was that he clearly had no idea I was there, even when I continued walking up the trail and passed behind him. He was so focused on the dance while he was doing it, and on his camera afterward (presumably to review the footage). Absolutely locked in. No situational awareness at all. I'm not a terribly observant person, but as someone who was taught situational awareness in basic training, I found this very amusing.
Oblivious influencers aside, the rest of my walk was uninterrupted. I passed by two bunkers on this island-turned-headland. The internet suggests they were built during WWI by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which controlled this area at the time. The bunkers, as visible above ground, are small, only big enough for a few men. I don't know how far, if at all, they extend underground. They are, unfortunately, not accessible for further exploration. I love seeing this kind of thing - I've been interested in bunkers since I got to explore the ones at Fort Warden in Washington state when I was ~12 or 13 years old, and the existence of two in the forest park is partly why I decided to press on with my exploration every time I considered heading home.
The first bunker.
A peek inside the bunker.
In the end, my walk took me along the edges of the whole peninsula and up to the medieval windmill. I walked to the store to buy a couple bread rolls since the stores are closed on Sundays, and was home by dinner time. It was quite a long walk, and my feet were definitely hurting long before I got back to my apartment, but I'm glad I went while the weather was so nice - it started raining on Monday and will continue pretty much all week.
Boats in the harbor at Medulin.