Montenegro

Today we headed out on another excursion. (After this our days become far less active!) this time we traveled 2-1/2 hours south to Kotor in Montenegro.

We passed on the standard/offered boat ride out to visit the little church Our Lady of the Rocks but here is a picture of her sitting in Kotor Bay. Pretty rock  pretty rock.

Unfortunately, even little Kotor is overrun by cruise ship day trippers these days. Crowds were plentiful even at 9:30am. But we toured around with a guide. Learned about the history, the Italian influence, and the Church of Our Lady of Health which is perched on the hillside above town.  The menfolk of the town were sailors and they built the church to honor the fact that they thought divine intervention saved them at sea. Our female guide told us that that the women of the town likewise look to that church to bring them good health. They walk up the hill every Sunday to visit the church…which makes them healthier…so a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Luckily we decided to skip lunch in the area and start back to Dubrovnik. When we approached the border, we stopped with about 15 cars ahead of us to find that the computer system was down. It came back up about thirty minutes later, but it still took us another thirty minutes to get through. Our guide heard later that the system went down again after we passed. 

So lunch in a little village in the valley instead. Then back here to rest up and to head out for a lovely dinner at Art Restaurant Renaissance on a little side street with lots of twinkly lights, great food, and a very pregnant woman singing Tracy Chapman songs and sipping red wine!

Then good night Dubrovnik.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Woke up at 3am after only six hours sleep so it wasn’t any hardship to get up and moving to meet our toursbylocals guide, Matija, at the Ploce Gate at 7am.

It gave me an opportunity to try different lighting in order to capture how smooth and shiny and wet-looking the large, well-worn cobblestones look here. Still doesn’t do them justice. They are really, really smooth and apparently deadly slick when it rains and they really do get wet. 

Anyway, we went off touring the countryside on a 2-1/2 hour drive to get to the bigger must-visit tourist attractions in Bosnia and Herzegovina. But don’t  get too excited….

Blagai Tekke (Dervish House)  billed as a stunning 16th century Sufi Monastery. (It was rebuilt after the war.) 

And Mostar, the second largest city (after Sarajevo) where this iconic 16th century bridge was also rebuilt after it, too, was destroyed during the war.

And then 2-1/2 hours back again.  

There were two border crossings (always fun) and some driving along the scenic coastline and past the oyster and mussel bays. Then a lovely, casual dinner and stroll this evening.

So, Bosnia and Herzegovina - check and check. 

Dubrovnik

Well. Apparently a more comfortable long trip is still a very LONG trip.  I did not sleep at all. Which meant we arrived into old town Dubrovnik having been awake for 23 hours at only 9a. So a long trip followed by a long day 

Our driver from the airport advised us that it is a shame that we didn't come 4 or 5 years ago. In the"before"times. Before crowds. Before rising prices. Before Game of Thrones fan travelers. This is apparently King's Landing. And an Iron Throne sitd out on Lokrum island. 

It is beautiful. Approaching by car. And up close and personal. The old town is walled, of course. Quite compact. And well-maintained.

We are staying in an Airbnb on a tiny street right off the main stradun a couple hundred meters inside the Ploce gate. 

And the weather is sublime. Sunny. Slight breeze. Ideal.  

We wandered a little. Took a rest wandered a bit more and then had a stellar meal at one of what must be 100 Italian restaurants in the old town 

Now I can barely stay awake long enough to write this. Gotta get some sleep.

For now, some pics:

Cheers!

Here we are on our flight from Miami to Istanbul transiting to Dubrovnik. This is the first time ever that we have purchased business class tickets. There was a time when we had banked nearly two million mileage points with American Airlines.  We used those miles judiciously through years when you could occasionally snag a business class seat to Europe for 40k miles one way. Now those one way tickets can run 400k!  I still found some tickets for future trips for 58k and 70k. But that is getting harder and harder. Thank goodness we are now extremely flexible in our planning. 

This time, thanks to Google flight search, I settled on buying tickets on Turkish Airlines.  They are cheaper than American, by quite a bit, and allow for a layover in Turkey including three nights in a hotel in Istanbul. We have wanted to go to Turkey since we took the kids to Greece in 1995. By the time we see Istanbul, we will have visited 77 countries. Not bad for two poor kids who had never traveled before we met each other and miraculously found this particular shared passion. 

We “fondly” remember 44hours of traveling from Mozambique to Johannesburg to Heathrow to Gatwick to Antigua to Anguilla all in Coach! Sleeping in airports or curled up on the floor of the plane under Michael’s feet and the seats in front of us.  We did what we had to do to get where we wanted to go; and that crazy path has brought us right here in this moment. Now the Chef has been by to take our entree orders, wine is on the tray, and we are settled in for a long but comfortable flight to IST and then on to the Dalmatian Coast. 

Cheers, Michael!🥂 

Rothenburg ob der tauber

Luckily, weather forecasting is no more accurate than drive time planning. While brisk, today never produced any predicted rain and was mostly partly sunny all day. Rothenburg is a cute, little, idyllic town so we had actually seen a good bit of it yesterday between arriving and having dinner.

We spent today meandering about on the cobblestones. Up and down and over and back. A coffee here. A pastry there. A drink at what was actually our first beer garden of the trip. Picked up a couple of Christmas ornaments. And three antique glass beer steins (Michael might have bought more but he ran out of cash and those stores don’t take credit cards,). A nice dinner at a quaint nearby restaurant and that’s a wrap. A really nice trip having taken in the alps, a couple of castles, and some really pretty towns,

Tomorrow we head to the airport (did we know ground crews for KLM are staging strikes? No we did not!) Fingers crossed we are not stranded at an airport during this trip and that we find our way tomorrow to England to visit friends, 

For now, Auf Wiedersehen. Tschau.

On The Road Yet Again (sept 16)

Driving from Luxembourg to Rothenburg ob der tauber. Started out before 11a with an ETA of just before 3p. How does that saying go?: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

We were tooling along great. Clear skies.  No slow downs. But the ETA kept getting later and later, of course. Then we came to a dead stop.  The trucks lined up in the right lane reminded me of the days long line of trucks on the road from landlocked Ethiopia to the ports in Djibouti. But this time we were right there along side of them.  45 km from our destination going nowhere.  I checked the maps. There was one exit ramp in the red zone on the navigation about 5km ahead.  We had a discussion again about what our best option was.  And as we were discussing, the red line on the navigation path turned white with red dots. Hmmmmm. That’s new.  Can’t be good. No, not good at all. Ask Google what does that white line with red dots mean on a road on your Google map?  Road closed! Choice made. We, and everybody else on this highway, is getting off at the exit. Then routing through small towns with little streets but with massive trucks. Fun, fun, fun.  Arriving at 4:35p.

Really, it’s been interesting. In addition to the now expected unexpected traffic delays, we had the tiny parking lot at the hotel in Garmisch (I ONLY selected hotels with parking) that was nearly full by the time we arrived late that night in the dark after the mountain pass closure and I could barely squeeze our compact SUV into a spot. In Luxembourg their robotic parking garage dictated the maximum size the rental car so I assumed I wouldn’t have to do the parking. Wrong. I had to drive the car into the car elevator, and then from the elevator to the robotic platform where the tires had to be perfectly positioned in the ruts and the car perfectly centered with the side view mirrors turned in so when the platform spun in circles and unloaded the car everything would stay attached. No stress there.  And here in Rothenburg there were those tiny little cobbled roads through arches and to the hotels garage (the blue house) with the solid, swinging out and down garage door that is on a timer and shuts on its own whether or not you or the car are in the way of the door or the swing of the door (no motion detector). Which it started to do as I was maneuvering in the tiny street in order to back in!

But we got here. And it’s adorable. (More later.)

Luxembourg and Inspiring Spires

Another gorgeous day. 

Breakfast at a very cosmopolitan patisserie with capuccini, croissants, and Bavarian pretzels. Gosh, I love traveling!  Though I am not sure that I have ever been provided a knife and fork for my croissant.  Rest assured that I used them!

After all, when in Luxembourg…

this the country with the highest GDP per capita in the world…. And patio umbrellas that read:

They have a few cute little shop signs 

And really pretty views walking along the corniche 

But Lordy, Lordy do they know how to do spires!