Day 15 - May 30

Distance: 12.3 miles (19.8 km)

Total so far - 139.3 miles (224.2 km)

Croatia.  Of all the places on our list of potential countries to visit for this trip, I've been looking forward to Croatia the most.  Why, you ask?  I will show you.  Curtis and I are going to be traveling up the Croatian coast - mostly through the region of Dalmatia (with a side-trip down to the country of Montenegro) over the next couple of weeks, so I've got plenty of time to teach you why this hook-shaped country on the east side of the Adriatic (across the sea from Italy) should be on your bucket list.

As soon as we left the Dubrovnik Airport, we got a taste of this mystical land.  The road from the airport hugs the mountain/hillsides along the coast, giving us sweeping views out over the many islands speckled along Croatia's shores.  Soon, the Old Town of Dubrovnik came into view, with its tangle of alleyways, church steeples, and  red terra cotta-roofed houses - all ringed by  the thick white medieval walls that jut out into the turquoise blue water of the Adriatic.  If any of my readers are Game of Thrones fans (I myself have not yet watched it or read the books) you should know that much of the series is filmed in Croatia, and quite a lot in Dubrovnik specifically, I hear.  The Old Town really does evoke images of a prosperous, mythical kingdom, and in fact, Dubrovnik was, for many centuries, the capital of a small prosperous, non-mythical republic called the Republic of Ragusa.  It managed to hold off the Venetians when they were a powerhouse in the Adriatic, and when the Ottomons took over the Balkan Peninsula, they allowed Dubrovnik to live in relative independence.  So since the 1300s til when the French took over in the early 1800s, Dubrovnik was a very rich city-state where freedom-loving citizens elected "rectors" to one-month terms (this protected against corruption).  Each rector got to enjoy their short time in the palace and take over affairs of the city-state.  I suppose they had an incentive to do a good job so they could get elected again and live in the palace some more.  Their motto was "Liberty shall not be sold for all the gold in the world" or something like that, so sounds like it was a great place to live (still is, just too many tourists).

Old Town Street

When we pulled into the bus station by the Old Town, we went to a supermarket for some bread, cheese, and meat, and then worked on finding the place we were staying.  We booked a room online that was actually in a family's apartment, so it was sort of like couchsurfing but for a small fee.  We haven't had any luck with couchsurfing, which you may or may not be familiar with (it's a website where you arrange to stay with hosts for free).  Unfortunately there haven't been many decent-sounding hosts in the areas we're going and the ones that do sound good end up not being able to host us.  

But anyway, we stayed in a spare room in a family's apartment.  It was wonderful.  The mother was incredibly kind and brought us lemonade and little cakes when we arrived and offered to do our laundry and show us good places to eat and let us use the kitchen and anything in it and all sorts of stuff like that.  Also, the view from the apartment was stunning - we were high on a hill overlooking the bay where the cruise ships dock.  The only problem with our lodging was that it was a mile walk from the Old Town.  So yeah, lots of walking again... surprise surprise.

View from the hill where we're staying

After we got to our place of lodging, we pretty much just crashed for a long while because we were ridiculously tired and it was raining outside anyway.  I woke up around 5pm and went for a run to a nearby big hill that serves as a wildlife preserve. I had spectacular views of the coastline and the sunset on the top.

On the hill of the nature park

View over the islands in the Adriatic

That evening, Curtis cooked up some chicken with beans and a sauce that he thought was tomato sauce but turned out to be a super-delicious mix of eggplant and tomatoes that apparently is ubiquitous in Croatia and nearby countries.  After supper, we were still exhausted and the weather was still gloomy, so we called it an early night.

Sunset and rain in the distance