A "European" breakfast of hot, flakey apricot croissant and good coffee, and we were off to the bus station.
Montenegro has actual bus stations, with schedules that are almost followed, and when driving you notice the free-for-all has ended; people more or less drive following most of the rules, there are actual traffic signs for stuff like speed limits, stopping and so on.
As we drove around Kotor Bay on our way to Dubrovnik, Croatia (it took over an hour of a 3 hour trip just to get around the bay) I was again amazed at the beauty of the whole area. Pretty town after town, beaches, flowers, churches and castles floating out on their own little islands; it would be easy to spend a week right here just exploring, not to mention we have not even explored any of the interior towns, or the capital, Podgorica.
Montenegro definitely is a place to return to.
We hit the border. Montenegro has its own border station where we checked out (No passport stamp again, damn it!) then we drove a half-kilometer to the Croatian border station for entry and inspection. PASSPORT STAMP! SCORE!!!!
Today 26 days onto the trip, 30 June, we are finally getting into Croatia, the country that this entire vacation was originally planned around. For the past three years, people we talk to here in Europe tell us we need to go to Croatia. So we planned a trip here, but then it seemed Greece was sooooo close…and of course if you are in Greece, Turkey is just right there; going the other way, we are surrounding Bosnia, just under Slovenia, which is next to Budapest… and so this monster of a trip grew.
But for now: two weeks in Croatia.
Once across the border the mountains pushed back a bit, so we were in a kind of wider coastal plain, not having to hug the cliffs so much. The trees were a blue-green or almost silver-green color; pines, manzanita type bushes, everything, but the mountains are still white.
After about a half hour in Croatia (three hour trip breakdown: one hour around Kotor Bay, about 45 minutes at customs, 30 minutes of stops, and 45 minutes actually driving in Croatia) we caught sight of Dubrovnik. We dropped at the bus station and literally walked into a postcard.
Think this: Santa Barbara on steroids would be about one-fourth as beautiful as this. All red roofs, narrow, steep alleys dropping into the town center, surrounded by thick city walls that drop right into the blue Adriatic.
Our guesthouse (4 rooms, we are #2, the second floor) is charming, huge, modern, well appointed and we even have a clothesline-on-pulley out the window! Score! And a real shower, big enough to turn around in, with curtain!
We sat with the owner, Pero, for about an hour or more at his kitchen table, sipping his mother’s home-made Raki (walnut brandy, not harsh like in Albania, very flavorful). We talked, first about Dubrovnik and what we must see and do, then on to our families: our kids (his son 21, daughter 18, both now in Zagreb at college - you know the deal, the kids from Zagreb come here, the kids from here flee to Zagreb...) and working too much (as the kids get older they take more money). His house, in which we are staying, is over six centuries old, but has been in his family, "only two hundred years." They are the “newcomers.” Family, work, house repairs, and then:
The War.
His son was four months old when the siege started, and his daughter was born during the war. Food and supplies were smuggled in, they had to run from building to building… the roofs were all blown off, and many homes and shops destroyed. It was very hard; their good friends lost everything. Now… The houses are all rebuilt and reroofed, his children were small enough they don't really remember, but for him? "It will take forever to forget. We were not prepared. Who thought? It is unimaginable... in the 20th century."
We just sat silently and sipped.
Our lives are fundamentally alike, but nothing the same; his is defined by a war that I was barely aware of, as I was busy starting my family and career in 1991.
"A journey is best measured in friends, not in miles." Tim Cahill
We ate lunch at Lady Pi Pi Tavern (in Europe “i” is “ee”), named for the statue fountain out front that is, you know, a woman going pee-pee. I had the most fantastic tuna salad, Gail had the Pi-Pi salad (don't ask), all washed down by a half litre of wine and litre gas water, framed by a view from under the grape arbor and over the city to die for. The air is filled with herds of swallows, madly chirping as they dive and swoop.
I think I could stay here a while. We have two days, so we get the beta on breakfast, café action, beaches, a cool bar, etc. Plus, and this is huge, Emily from ABC's “The Bachelorette” was here! To think we are walking the very streets she walked! Gail is excited to share this with her best friend.
We spent a very slow, leisurely day wandering the streets. Pretty easy really, Dubrovnik is laid out more in blocks and less like a maze. We are staying in the uphill section, about 100-150 steps up from the main street, called the Placa-Stradun. It is almost like a city long square, with two of the three gates in the city at either end. Off the Placa, narrow side streets, so narrow that you have to hug the wall to squeeze past the café tables. At each end of the placa are large, public fountains (for drinking); a church at one end, the clock tower at the other. At the fountain a man endlessly sawed a screeching, non-tune on an ancient guitar looking instrument while the hot tourist sitting in the shade fanned herself in time to the droning saw. We wandered out of the walls and found a fantastic laundry, with WiFi, free soap and a book exchange. We got real gelato (Finally! That is a mark of that dividing line I mentioned before. South it is ice cream, called gelato. I hate ice cream. Today we crossed the real gelato line.), found a bookstore with some English books (we both have read the 4 books we brought) and just enjoyed the spaces and the people filling them.
We ended up at sunset on the cliffs, through an easily missed, almost secret door through the southern, thick, city wall, outside to a bar that stepped and wound its way down the cliff to the Adriatic below. We snagged a table right on the edge and drank the sun down, watching ships pass, listening to music and the conversations around us (Oops! Guy next to us kicked his flip flop over the edge. It missed the people below but it is waaaay down there. We all laughed.) and being circled by the chattering, darting swallows.
We walked back out through the darkening streets, now lit by the streetlights and candles on the dinner tables. At 21:30 we stop at a little cafe covering the stairs of a church and decide to settle in. Good wine, tasty smoked ham and cheese rolls on salad with pine nuts and balsamic vinaigrette, and a marvelous pasta with such thinly shaved truffles. Done eating about 23:30, and so we walked slowly home for the night. A magical city.