Sheep Guarding Llama

Another day and another big breakfast.  We don’t know what to do with the amount of food that we are being served.  We feel terrible not eating the majority of it, it is made just for us.  But there is just so much of it.  Even if we were starving when we arrive for breakfast, which we never are, there is no way that we could eat this much.  It does not help that each of the girls gets a full adult portion of food.  It is crazy.  Tomato, cucumber, eggs, crepes, donuts, cheese, butter, bread, crackers, cakes, a bowl of fruit, yoghurt, juice…  it’s crazy.

Today is a lazy day for us.  Well for most of us.  I spent the day working from the hotel getting caught up, a little bit, on writing and posting.  We have been so busy on this trip that I have had barely any time to be doing anything.  In some ways that is good, I have needed a break, but it also means that there is just that much more for me to do whenever I get the chance.

We never really left the hotel all day.  We did coffee downstairs at one point but the weather was not great for the girls to be out on the beach for very long so we did not put in very much time there.

For dinner tonight we could not decide where to go until quite late and finally the only good option was really just to eat in the hotel.  Luciana really wanted to go get the pasta that they had gotten the other night but we did not want to deal with going down there and we knew that the girls were going to want to play on the playground but that it was too cold and it would just make everyone unhappy.  So eating in our hotel is what we decided to do.

A quiet evening for us.  A simple dinner and getting everyone off to sleep.  Tomorrow we drive to Prishtina, Kosovo and Luciana turns five!  Dominica was off to sleep first, tonight, then I got the girls off to sleep later.  Luciana was the last one to go to sleep and I tucked her in as a four year old for the last time.

Both girls have, at around these ages, expressed their dislike for getting older.  They love being kids and wish that it could last longer.  They don’t want to grow up.  I remember Liesl when I tucked her in the night before she turned four; she just cried and cried because she loved being three and didn’t want to be older.  Luciana is not so dramatic, but the sentiments are there.  These ages are so much fun.  At least they appreciate that and sense the need to hold on to it.

The final verdict is that we like Albania a lot, it is a wonderful country with wonderful people.  A truly fantastic coastline and epic opportunities.  But it doesn’t feel like the right fit for us.  Financially it is totally viable and could be very nice, but we just are not “feeling” it.  It is a perfect place for the week long summer beach holiday crowd.  But for a family looking for an authentic, local living experience there was very little that we found that really seemed like it would make sense to us.

We got up and did breakfast in our hotel.  The included breakfast here at the Hotel Espana is just enormous.  We work hard to eat a sizeable amount of it.  We always feel bad that they make so much and we really cannot eat it all.  There is just more than we can reasonably eat!

After breakfast our project for the day was to drive down to southern Albania and get a feel for the area.  We have only just barely gotten to see the coast and much of the available or accessible coastal areas are south of here.  So we wanted to be sure that we got to see that stuff.

Going south for a ways, the Albanian highway is pretty good.  They are working hard to get highways put in and built around the country as fast as they can.  A decade ago, I have heard, there were barely any paved roads in the country.  Now there are fast roads going all over.  It’s not extensive, but it is surprisingly good for the region and worlds beyond where we had been led to believe that they currently were.

The first place that we attempted to go to was Spille.  It did not take us long to get to where the road turns off to head to Spille on the coast.  We missed it as there was no exit but just a tiny, no warning turn off for it.  You really had to know to be looking for it and exactly where it was going to be.

I managed to find a sort of drive way not long after the Spille turn off and just took that and drove a little dirt path that went along some fields and got us back to the road.  A little bit adventurous there.

The road to Spille was a lot longer than we had anticipated.  It wound up around some hills and went through some really lovely areas but it was also collapsing in places and in several spots the road had fallen away and in one the whole road was so damaged that we had to inch forward.

It was an interesting drive and the condition of the road made us wonder how Spille could have any tourists visiting it.  This was not a place for the faint of heart to drive.  Very accessible, but not exactly casual.

Once we arrived in Spille we were even more confused.  We drove up to the beach, or as close as we could get, and there was no tourist infrastructure at all.  Once up to the frontage road there was an obviously protected stretch of pine forest against the water and behind it a line of small hotels mostly in poor repair.  Some were being worked on while we were there, some looked like they were no longer in use.  It was a bizarre place with these weird hotels all in a row, away from the village and separated from the beach.

At the end of the row we came to a dirt road, a disaster of a flea market, a well advertised and clearly collapsing hotel, the Blu Mare, a Roma woman living in a tent, loads of trash in the street and a little spot where we could access the beach. It was all very strange.

We circled back and went through town on another road.  This one was a little better.  There were a few, nicer, bigger houses in town and some shops and such.  But it was all still quite strange.

We tried to get to the beach by another way.  Of course, we used Google Maps, foolish us.  Google turned us onto a “road” that was listed like any other.  It was dirt and started off okay.  Well not okay, but passable.  And not passable by two cars, really just a dirt path through fields witch ditches on either side and no way to get through without driving all over the road to keep the car from bottoming out.

The road got worse and worse and we couldn’t figure out if we should go back or turn around.  Nothing was a good option but we decided that we could not go on.  The road was just getting to be so bad.

We got out onto a larger road, still dirt (and I mean DIRT, not gravel or rocks) and found a spot where the car could do the manoeuvre to make the turn around and in doing so we bottomed out lightly and after that I heard some odd sounds while we were driving.  We were only creeping along, even five kilometres per hour would be generous.  I got out and there it was, part of the front bumper torn off.  Just what we needed.

We were not in a place to deal with it at all but we could not move the car without doing damage.  I crept along and got the car off of the “road” so that the farm equipment could get by.  Here Dominica and I got out and really took a good hard look at it and figured out that with enough strength we thought that we could get things back into place.  We worked and worked and we managed to snap things back together, more or less.  It was enough pressure to cut my hand a little, but not too badly.  We were really impressed with ourselves for getting things “fixed.”  It is definitely not actually fixed, but it is not hanging low and going to tear the car apart ten feet up the road now, which is exactly what was going to happen if we had not been able to fix it.  It would have been a total disaster had I not stopped the moment that I heard the noise.  Imagine if I had just not had my window down!

We did what we could to get back to a gravel or paved road.   Even with the car back together it was really hard going.  We got very lucky that we managed to drive out.  That took a long time and was exhausting.

Back on the collapsing road we just drove back out of the Spille area the way that we had come in and went back to the highway and headed down towards the south.  The next place to check out was Vlore, much farther south.  Vlore is a small port with its own bay.

Getting down to Vlore the highway that we were on stopped and we had to take normal roads through a few towns, which was slow going, before we got to an autobahn which was amazing.  Suddenly, out of nowhere, a super high speed, very different type of highway zipped us right down to Vlore and… dropped us onto pot hole filled roads so bad we almost could drive down them!  So weird.

Vlore turned out to be a really nice city.  Much more like we are used to in the rest of Europe.  Clearly it is developing quickly and they have not figured out their internal roads and water front yet, but they seem to be making some good progress and have some stuff in place already. Vlore is actually a nice city on its own and has water front a well.  Not just water front with nothing behind it.

We parked the car and walked around Vlore a little bit.  We tried to find food but place after place was serving coffee only.  Very frustrating.  We got directed to the Hotel Bologna so we word our way over there and inquired at the front desk.

The front desk was not sure if they were serving food today as they had a wedding this evening so they had to check.  The chef came out and said that they would make space for us.  A huge hotel restaurant and we were the only people in it.  So weird.

Dominica was nearly passing out from all of her motion sickness medication which made ordering food a little hard.  I went for the red mullet which turned out to be half a dozen small fish in the European style of being full fish, not fillets.  I know that I am adapting to being a European when I don’t have a problem taking six fix and eating them without a problem even with the head, tail and bones all intact.  I both can “handle” the situation and I know how to do the actual eating which itself is confusing and challenging if you have never had to do it before.

The food was all quite good and the hotel was actually an excellent spot with lots of its own waterfront.  It had a very classic Adriatic waterfront and a little playground.  So after we ate we went out and let the girls play for ten minutes or so and checked out the patio area.

From the hotel we went back to one of the cafes along the main pedestrian way, one that Liesl liked because everything was decorated in flowers and Luciana liked because it had a playground.  We ordered some coffee and sat outside while the girls played.  It was a little chilly as it was windy and stormy and the sun was blocked but it was not too bad.

After the coffee and some gelato, which we had finally located, we walked back to the car and reversed our journey back up north to Golem.  The drive back took far less time than the drive down.  Without the Spille stop it really was not bad at all.  More than an hour, but nothing dramatic.  It was a good trip and we got to see a lot of stuff.  We have a much better feel for Albania, now.

We got back and the girls just wanted to relax and play in the hotel room as they had been couped up in the car for so long.  We just had an early dinner at our hotel.  It is impossible to find any places to eat of interest on the strip.  They all look exactly the same from the outside.  And most are closed.  Just makes the most sense to eat at our own place.

Tonight a storm rolled in.  Rain and thunder over the Adriatic.

We got up around nine this morning and went down to partake of the breakfast at the Hotel Espana here in Golem, Albania outside of Durres.  We went downstairs and sat outside.  We were the only ones getting breakfast this morning.

Breakfast was just brought out for us and it was huge.  Even with an oversized table the four of us could not fit around it with all of the food.  Food just kept coming and coming.

It was rather an overwhelming amount of food for just four people to eat, especially when two of those people are very petite.  We had tons and tons left over, even though all of it was really good.  We each got crepes, a tomato, cucumber, cheese, bread, French toast (egg toast), a soft boiled egg, a cake, yoghurt, two kiwi fruit, fried dough, cracker style bread, salami (which sadly we could not eat) and a fresh squeezed fruit juice!  It was a bit over the top, but very impressive.  And this is all free with our one room!  This meal alone is so impressive that it really makes staying at the hotel nearly free for us.

We decided that we like it here at the hotel and the beach is so nice that we are going to stay here for a few days.  The value of the hotel is so good that we can just spend some time and the Internet access is very good, so I am able to do things while Dominica and the girls relax.  Some sun and beach time is good for everyone.  So we extended our stay until Monday giving us the weekend here.

After breakfast the girls wanted beach time.  So we went up to the room and got them into bathing suits and got their beach toys that Dominica had purchased for them in Montenegro and they went down to the beach with Dominica.  I worked in the room for about half an hour and then took my laptop down to join them.

Dominica and I sat out on the veranda where I had decent Internet access from the hotel’s wifi and was able to work on my laptop while Dominica and I had our morning coffee with milk (a white coffee, made with espresso, of course.)  The girls played until they were tired of the beach and wanted to go back up to the room to relax.  We probably got an hour or more of beach time this morning.

We hung out in the hotel room for a lot of the middle of the day.  The girls watched videos and played video games while Dominica sat out on the balcony reading and enjoying the sea view.  I sat at the kitchen table and was able to get quite a bit done this morning.  It was a decent way to pass the day.

Dominica was determined to have a day without going anywhere so today was a stay at “home” day.  Tomorrow we plan to drive down the coast after breakfast and get a feel for the area and what it might have to offer.

This evening, around five thirty, we finally cajoled the girls into heading out for a walk down the beach to the south to find a place to go to for dinner.  Secretly Dominica and I were on the look out for a restaurant on the beach with a small playground so that the girls would have that to do while we ate.

This meant that pretty much it was Dominica and me having dinner together.  The girls were very occupied and made friends with whoever happened along so they were quite busy.

Dinner was huge and not what we were expecting.  I ordered what Dominica thought was  a pasta dish but was actually fruit of the sea in a buttery cream sauce.  Good, but not what I had thought that I was going to get.  It was basically a soup made of just cream and butter and then loads and loads of squid, scallops and such cooked in it.  Good, but surprising.  Dominica did “angry cream” which was a spicy pepper sauce on penne pasta.  Liesl had pasta with butter, a go to favourite for the girls.  Luciana got fried cuttlefish, or that is what we ordered, but she ended up with a massive plate of mixed seafood including whole fried prawns (which none of us can really stomach the thought of, even if they taste great) and lots of mussels which are good but not something that she is going to eat.  She loved the cuttlefish, though.

We ate and then the girls went back to the playground for a bit.  We were in no hurry, it is a Friday night after all, so Dominica and I just relaxed for a bit.  There was tons of leftover food that we could not possibly eat.  We just can’t eat the serving sizes that they have here. They certainly put Texan portion control to shame here in Albania.

An orange creamsickle cat was circling us through much of dinner.  After the girls left, it sneaked up onto Luciana’s chair and nosed her plate.  We felt badly that we had not finished enough of the food, but there was just too much for us to eat, so we slyly fed that cat as much as we dared to make it look like we had eaten more.  The cat had no qualms about the whole prawns and made much more efficient meals of them than we would have.  And it ate nearly all of the remaining seafood.  So we did not feel nearly so badly about having gotten so much food.  Apparently next time we need to just order for two people and the kids can snack off of our plates.  That would be a much more appropriate amount of food.  The bill was twenty seven Euros, not bad at all.

We walked back

We walked back to the hotel.  The girls just wanted to use Dominica’s laptop to watch YouTube. Dominica put in about an hour looking up property listings for the Albanian coast to see what our options would be and to see what might make sense for us to go and look at tomorrow as far as towns and areas.  Our plan is to do breakfast and then to get right onto the road to go explore southern Albania along the coast.

I did some normal work, plus some SGL catch up tonight.  I also started working on the daunting task of getting Dominica’s iPhone 6 uploaded to Flickr and YouTube.  She has let the phone be three and a half years behind without being uploaded so the amount of work to be done is crazy now and she has not been taking pictures with her phone in a long time because the memory has been full.  So many opportunities have been lost because it has not been managed well.  The Internet here is so good that I am trying to rectify as much of that as I possibly can while the opportunity is so good.

Dominica went to bed around ten.  Luciana was asleep by ten thirty.  Liesl and I were the only ones still awake after elven.

It is a beautiful morning for our final time in Montenegro.  Our plan was to be up and out the door very quickly this morning.  We have a bit of driving to do to get down to the south side of Durres, Albania and we want to get down there and have most of the day to do things and see stuff in Albania.  We did a good job of getting up and getting moving early but, when we went to check out of the rented apartment around ten, we discovered a cement truck had blocked our driveway completely!  We got someone to find the driver and he came out and explained that we were stuck there for the next hour, nothing to be done.

We took this in stride, thank goodness we did not have to get to an airport today, and we went to the Caffe Cuba and enjoyed some coffee on the beach while the girls played on the beach for an hour.  Not a bad way to handle the situation.

We would not have had enough time to get coffee or anything otherwise and we got to enjoy our little village in Montenegro for a little longer.

Once the cement truck moved a glass door truck pulled up instead.  Argh.  This is going to be a frustrating morning.

Know that we had to get out of the driveway somehow we left the cafe and got everyone loaded into the car.  The second truck did not stay long but we then discovered that cars had sneaked in behind us and we could not fit the Ford Focus out between them.  It wasn’t close, it was just impossible.  The available space was a full foot narrower than the car was wide.  But the owner of one of the cars was alerted by someone and he came running up from the promenade and moved for us.  And we were off on the road to our next country, Albania.

The drive south went fine getting us down to Bar, which we had just explored ourselves.  After Bar we were off into the mountains and wild inland areas of Montenegro, very different from what we have seen thus far.

This part of the drive was very interesting.  We have not seen this part of Montenegro at all and it was not what we had been expecting.  We started by climbing up into the mountains on a very small, not wide enough for two cars to pass by, road which was yet another failure from Google Maps.  The drive was interesting but difficult and pointlessly dangerous as the road was far too tight and there were few or no sides in places where you were forced to go off of the road just to let people get by!  It was kind of crazy.

This nutty drive, however, allowed us to see a very interested high farming region up above the coastal areas which was nothing like the Montenegro of the coast that we have been seeing for the last few days.   Overall I am glad that we took the drive and got to see this area.

It was practically no time before we encountered the Albanian border up in the hills.  It is surprising just how easy it is to stumble on these borders and how completely unlabelled and nondescript they are.  The entire border process is so casual and easy.

There was a bit of a line at the Albanian border, but mostly this was because they were processing cars in batches.  To speed things up a guard would walk to about four or five cars at a time, collect passports and car registrations and walk them into the main office to be processed.  From what I could tell they did not have a computer out at the car booth and had to process the passports inside the main building so were doing this to keep things moving.

We ended up at the head of a batch so had to sit for a while at the front of the line with nothing happening.  But it was not more than ten minutes and we were our way.  No questions or issues with our insurance and green card.  Very easy.  Everyone was very friendly.  And we are into Albania!

The northern bit of Albania was very rural and unexciting.  It was not much different from southern Montenegro except that the roads were far better.  There was plenty of room to drive and we were able to travel much more quickly.

Before long we found a neat castle and turned more towards the south.  The northern coast of Albania is mostly protected land and parks so there is very little near the coast up there.

Our drive took us a few hours down to Durres, the big port of Albania and the first point inside of the country where we got a chance to see the coast.  Durres sits at the north end of a massive bay that includes the resort stretch of Golem which in the last decade has been turned from untouched pine forest protected by decades of dictator rule to a horrible, destroyed stretch of cookie cutter hotels by just ten years of democracy and money influencing building permits.  It’s very sad.

We drove down the Golem and stretch and located our hotel, the Hotel Espana.  The hotel is located very centrally along the beach in the middle of the resort stretch.  It was late afternoon when we were getting checked in.  We have the feeling that we might be the only people staying at the hotel today.  We got our choice of a first floor suite with views of the Adriatic or a fourth floor with views of the mountains but we want sea view and the girls did not even want to go look at the higher room.  The room has a full kitchen and a separate bedroom and a dining room table and everything.  It was originally meant to be an apartment, not a hotel, I think.

We got settled in and pretty soon went down to the restaurant to get ourselves an early dinner since we had had no breakfast or lunch today, just some snacks in the car while we drove down to Golem.  I got seafood risotto again, since I got to eat almost nothing of the risotto that I had ordered last night as Liesl stole it all from me.  Dominica and Liesl both got a vegetable risotto.  We all ate outside so that we could sit out on the beach.

Both girls were immediately out onto the beach to play in the sand.  They are so excited.  This is amazing sand, perfect for getting to play in.  Very fine and great to walk on, too.  We are very impressed with the “Florida” like beaches here on the Golem stretch.  This is the best sand, by far, that we have seen along the Adriatic.  Not at all how I picture the Adriatic.  Apparently this type of coast line is unique to Albania here and as Albania has been so closed for so long no one really thinks of the Adriatic this way.

After we ate we went for a walk down the beach for a long way the four of us, but the girls were pretty restless and did not really want to walk.  Dominica and I thought that we would be able to find an ice cream place but we had no luck, there was nothing like that even walking nearly to the end of the built up portions of the beach.  Very strange, in my opinion.

The beach is nearly all nondescript and boring four to ten story hotels and condo buildings.  Many seem nice, many seem bland.  Almost every single one has a restaurant on its bottom floor with the same menu of fish, pizza and pasta as the ones around it.  No visible variation anywhere.  Very odd.

We spent a bit of time looking at condo buildings to see what there was.  Dominica has been doing a lot of research into real estate prices here so we have a decent idea of what things will cost here.

I walked everyone back as it was getting dark and they went up to the room to watch shows on YouTube and read.  I went out for a longer walk going as far as possible to the north on the Golem beach to see what I could find.  The beach hits a small river coming down from the mountains and you have to go out to the road to get a bridge so I turned around there and walked back to the hotel in the dark.  On my way back to the hotel there was really no one left on the beach.  There had been lots of people earlier and even on my walk north but once I turned around there was no one left.

We called it an early night back at the hotel.  Our Internet here appears to be pretty good and I am able to do uploads very quickly.  But for some reason Dominica’s iPhone and the girls’ Kindle Fires cannot connect to the Internet no matter what we do.  But the laptops and my iPhone work just fine.

Today is our last full day in Montenegro, tomorrow we will be checking out of our apartment here and heading south down to the Durres area of Albania on the coast several hours south of here.

We started the day with a run to the Voli grocery store right behind our apartment.  We needed some basics to restock our car supplies so that we are ready for tomorrow’s road trip down to Albania.

After the grocery run it was time for some coffee at Panini’s, which does not actually have any sandwiches, at least not this early in the season. But at least we were able to get coffee.  The weather is getting heavier today with winds having picked up significantly and while we were out on the end of the promenade we could see sea spray going at least fifteen feet into the air which is unlike anything we have seen here yet.

Most of the day there was a slow drop in temperature with an increase in wind speeds.

As this is our last daytime here in Petrovac, we did more beach time so that Dominica and I could enjoy relaxing by the water and the girls could play on the beach.  We did more coffee, this time at Caffe Cuba, and then mojitos.

We have learned that the thing that people do here is to have little to no sauce on pizzas and then have ketchup with the pizza.  Every place that we have been has regular ketchup and spicy ketchup and the grocery stores even sell specific pizza ketchup.  Very weird, but the ketchup is really good here and it actually works pretty well for dipping pizza into, especially the spicy ketchup.

We had a pretty relaxing day today.  Lots of low key beach time and then we spent the afternoon and into the evening in the apartment.  Dominica did some packing to get us ready for the drive tomorrow.  I worked on posting and writing.

In the early evening, maybe around six, we went out to find some dinner.  We spent at least half an hour arguing about where we could go, or more.  No one could agree on anything.

Eventually we got everyone to agree to go to Katic if we promised to take Liesl afterwards to Lazaret to get pizza to take home because she had begged to get that veggie pizza from there that she loved so much from our first night in Petrovac.  So that was our compromised.

Katic was awesome.  We had an amazing dinner but had to move to the back as far under the roof as possible as it got cold quickly.  We had our jackets on but were still cold.  The restaurant brought us blankets to put over ourselves to keep us warm.  This worked, both girls bundled up and were decently happy after that.

The big food winner tonight was Liesl discovering that she loved my seafood risotto that I had ordered.  She ended up just stealing my meal and eating nearly the whole thing.  She actually just took my plate and devoured it!  We were pretty happy that we discovered a new food that she really liked.  And it was full of squid, octopus, scallops and more and she ate it all.  And they were grilled, getting the girls to eat things like grilled octopus is hard.  So this was a huge victory.

After dinner there was some confusion while I dealt with the bill at Katic.  Dominica took Liesl to the wrong restaurant and they got just a cheese pizza.  Liesl was confused and didn’t feel that she could explain that this wasn’t the pizza that she liked but it all happened very fast and she didn’t know what to do.  I actually lost everyone because I went to the other restaurant and they were not there.  It made for a bit of an unhappy evening for a bit.

Back home and packing.  We plan to leave right away in the morning.  Excited about getting to Albania.