No leisurely breakfast today, believe it or not: we wanted to be on the road by 7:00, so we woke early, had a coffee, said goodbye to Vanessa, Avni’s father and step-mother, and headed out.

It was easy to get out of the area, and we headed up a mountain. And up. And up. And yes, I had to look down or to the side where there was no drop-off much of the time. I am amazed at these mountains and also rather scared … or, to be honest, VERY scared sometimes! Cars pass by so closely. Cars pass us to get ahead even at what I would consider very dangerous times.

We got to the border crossing and said goodbye to Kosovo (where they DID ask Greg to show the insurance so I’m sure glad we bought that the second time we entered Kosovo!), and then said hello to Montenegro. Again, such beautiful country! It began with so many trees and the mountains were beautiful. We drove and drove and the terrain did eventually change. The road continued to scare me a lot. The road was so narrow at times. When we turned on to one road we thought it might not be right it was so narrow but as it turned out it was just a narrow scary road for a good (or bad) long time. As I told Greg, I had a lot of time to look at the floor of the car, and I held on to the the bar on the door (or whatever it’s called) to help hold the car on the road. I thanked Greg later for not killing us, too! We had a few extremely scary moments … just crazy drivers!

Eventually we got to the next border, saying goodbye to Montenegro and hello to Bosnia & Herzegovina. Any photos I got were from the moving car so they are pretty awful, but there was really no choice.

Here are photos from the drive … I’m sorry I can’t label them at the moment … just dropping them here and hoping they will load!

More photos … (doing only so many at a time):

Heh … never mind. Internet crashed. It’ll have to wait.

UPDATE: Here you go … just a few at a time, though … don’t want to crash this thing!

Did I mention that the sign photos are mostly so I can look back and figure out just where we were? And tunnels … TONS of tunnels on a very new road in Montenegro.

BUT there was something else I wanted to mention and now I’m drawing a blank. Argh … I hate when that happens. This will be my place holder in case I finally recall what it was. I need to take notes while I’m in the car, I guess.

Finally, there was our country destination: hello Croatia! We continued the drive for a rather short time and got to the city we will spend the next few days in: Dubrovnik is the city, and we are staying in the historic old town. What a place. First we had to find the parking garage. It’s absolutely horrendously expensive. The most we’ve ever spent for something like this (they say it’s best not to have a car while here and I would agree!). THEN we had to find our way down to the old town. Turns out we would have fared better getting a car to take us to a gate, but not knowing that we hiked with all our luggage down stairs and stairs and more stairs. Greg and Jan had wheeled luggage and that was more difficult than our backpacks, but even the packs were painful with the heat, humidity, and stairs. When we reached the gate we weren’t close to our final destination so we continued to walk and take more stairs. But we did eventually get to the rooms. We are situated in a nice place and I’ve neglected so far to take photos, but suffice it to say we are content to have rooms with air conditioning.

After washing up we went out, had beers and a snack at the restaurant right across from our door, and then walked a while. It’s quite a place and of course we’ll spend a lot more time checking it out tomorrow. Then it was dinner time.

I really wish I could post photos now … so sorry you can’t see this wonderful city!

UPDATE: The next post shows the Dubrovnik photos.

We looked at a number of places and eventually opted to go to a spot on our street, because we saw a server showing customers there the choices of fish for today, and because (hooray!) they had a room with A/C and we were just so darn warm. The dinner was super, and our server was really fun … she had a sense of humor we could relate to! What a fun, fun time.

So here we are in our room, and I’m typing and hoping I can post some photos, but the internet connection is so weak I’m guessing they won’t work so first i will post this and then see if I can add those after it’s published. If photos don’t work I’m guessing I’ll have to wait until our next destination.

Side note: This trip is ending too soon. I could go on and on and I’d be a happy camper. But of course one does have to finally get back to real life and (sigh) work.