Sheep Guarding Llama

I woke up this morning at twenty past seven. The bright light off of the sea and getting to bed before midnight helped to get me moving. Dominica was up soon thereafter and even Luciana, who had fallen asleep the earliest, was awake just after nine. Liesl, always the sleepyhead, was the only one who slept in for very long.

Just before ten I walked down the hill to get to the Hotel Excelsior where they have an ATM as I needed some cash to pay for our apartment. That was not a long walk and I was able to take out exactly what we needed to pay for our apartment so that we would have no left over Croatia money (Kuna) at all. Perfect.

I walked back up the hill getting a decent amount of morning exercise. Once back I showered and got myself ready to go while Dominica worked on getting the girls ready. We wanted to be on the road on the early side, we don’t want anything going wrong with the drive today given that we don’t have working headlights at this point.

We were out of the Villa Odak at ten thirty and were on the road. The drive out of Dubrovnik was easy and the drive south through the last bits of Croatia was very nice. We were surprised to find just how large the Dubrovnik enclave is and the large, wide valley that supports the region surrounded by sheer mountain faces to the east was really interesting.

Before long we were exiting Croatia and found ourselves at the Montenegrin border. Montenegro border control informed us, not surprisingly, that while Montenegro was listed on our green card for our car that a copy of the green card is not valid and so we would, once again, need to purchase additional insurance at the border. A pain but it was only fifteen Euros so not a big deal. Border control was friendly and helpful.

Once into Montenegro we took the scenic route to cling to the Adriatic shoreline and see as much of the coast as we could on our drive as who knows when we will be driving through this way again. Before long we were at the Bay of Kotor, one of Montenegro’s more famous locations. We took the very long drive along the bay which was very interesting as a huge amount of Montenegro’s coastline is against the Bay and not against the Adriatic. Nice little villages along here and Kotor itself, with an imposing Venetian fortress, was really neat. Kotor is also famously the site of the Casino Royale, of James Bond fame, even though the movie was not filmed in this part of the world and they made the movie nothing like the region.

After the Bay of Kotor the speed of our drive picked up considerably and before long we were coming into Budva. Prior to Budva, Montenegro was mostly outdated and small villages, not quite what we were expecting being seafront coast line, there were hotels and some resort like areas but they were small and mostly quite old. The difference from Croatia was dramatic. Getting to Budva, suddenly we turned from a somewhat desolate, old school Adriatic region into an endless sea of billboards that made you feel like you had been transported to the heart of trashy Florida – it was absolutely awful. Thirty seconds of driving into Budva we knew that this part of Montenegro was clearly something we had no interest in and needed to do no more than drive through and put behind us. Montenegro needs to pass some laws about billboards or they are going to destroy their country. Budva, beyond the billboards, was the worst couple of kilometres of the Adriatic coast that we have seen. Very much worth avoiding.

We did not make it all of the way through Budva before we hit stopped traffic. There was major construction going on on the only road leading south from the city so we were stuck.  We sat for maybe twenty minutes without any cars moving when a taxi driver behind us got out and convinced several cars to shift so that he could make a u-turn and go back into Budva.  We followed suit and went in search of lunch since we had been planning to tackle that once we had arrived in our village.  This seemed like an opportune time to deal with that and hopefully the traffic would clear by the time that we returned.  Dominica and thought that we could bypass the city but once we turned around she realized that the bypass loop was actually right where we had turned around and that it would not bypass the issue at all.

We had seen a restaurant, high on a bluff overlooking the sea, that looked awesome before we got to the trashy disaster that is Budva, so we decided to drive all of the way back through the city up north to find it again.

It was a short drive and we found El Rey, a cute and apparently very popular sea view restaurant.  We found parking and had to sit inside as every outside table was taken.  This wasn’t bad as the girls did not want to be outside and the restaurant was all glass so the views were still very good.  We found food that everyone wanted and ordered and had an amazing meal, highly recommended.  I had the best salmon penne pasta that I think I have ever had and we had our best coffee that we have had (and would have) for a while.  We were very happy with our meal and our decision to drive so far back to get it.

We continued on and found that traffic was still stopped, but was not backed up as far as it was when we were there earlier so we knew that things moved from time to time.  We sat for probably five or ten minutes without any movement then we were able to go.  Not too bad and we were glad that we had taken the hour or longer break to get a nice lunch while we had the chance.

Once we were past the traffic jam we made good time and were in Petrovac, our village for the next few days, quite quickly.  Getting into the village was quite easy and we found a parking lot in the middle of town and the grocery store, Voli, that our apartment was supposed to be right behind, but we could not see the apartment.  Dominica sent me on driving some and we went to the north and to a dead end in town where I could barely turn around and we really did not fit very easily.  Driving can get to be rather challenging in these little towns.  So we returned to the parking lot and Dominica set off on foot to see what she could find out about our apartment.

Ten or fifteen minutes of searching on foot and Dominica had no idea where the apartment was.  So she returned to the car and we called from my phone (as hers never seems to work) and got a description of where to go, which was directly behind the Voli super market and we were able to park and got right into our apartment.

Our Montenegrin apartment in Petrovac is a super modern refurbished apartment in an old stone building one building behind the boardwalk of the village.  Our front entrance touches the back of the Voli, which is very handy for getting supplies, and our back terrace goes directly into the back side of the Cuba Caffe Bar so that we can get drinks and pizza without even leaving the apartment, which is neat.  And from that entrance we spill out directly onto the boardwalk which touches the beach.  So even though we are not exactly water front we have a small Adriatic view from the back door and window and we can get to the bar, boardwalk and beach without ever coming close to a road.  We are right in the centre of everything.

We got settled in, got the Internet access up and running and set out to get some mojitos and relax with the view of the sea.  The mojitos were good but definitely not as good as the ones from Dubrovnik yesterday, those were the best ever.

We decided to walk the boardwalk and explore.  I did a little walking on my own to get a quick feel of where we could go then we all went and did a long walk to most of the entire board walk and got ice cream while we were out.  We had to leave the apartment unlocked as the back door lock was broken so we texted the apartment owners and they came over after we had ice cream to work on it.

The apartment owner and I were able to get the lock working enough to get us through the day but a handy man is going to come over in the morning to get it working reliably.  All of these logistics got us to nearly dinner time.

At eight thirty, after we were settled, had relaxed, and dealt with stuff at the house, after I had made a grocery run to get some necessities and such, we set out in search of dinner.  There are at least a dozen restaurants on the boardwalk, mostly seafood and pizza.  We looked for a while but had seen one, the Mediterranio, that looked great on our earlier walk so we headed there.

We learned from this experience that we eat much later than Montenegrins do and we were starting dinner about when the last people in town were finishing.  We were likely the last diners out on the entire boardwalk!  And we were the only ones with kids, too.

Dinner was awesome.  Liesl and Luciana split an order of fried calamari, which they really liked.  Dominica got Dalmation style fish and I went for a seafood risotto which was mostly octopus and mussels and was very delicious.  The whole dinner was really, really good.  We felt bad keeping them open until ten thirty, they likely would have closed up and gone home at least an hour earlier if we had not been there, but we were easily half of all of their business for the evening so we could only feel so bad.

After dinner we did a little walking on the boardwalk in the dark, although the boardwalk is well lit, and then went back to the apartment to call it a night.  We were all ready for bed and nearly asleep before midnight.

There were only a small number of people out and about today in Petrovac.  Many of the restaurants and bars are only serving limited menus, or only drinks, because it is still the middle of the shoulder season and there are very few tourists around.  Our selection is rather limited for a lot of things, it would appear.

The village itself is gorgeous.  An old village with a mix of old stone buildings and modern construction.  Lots of things going up currently as Montenegro is a hot bed of building.  The sea views are excellent and the boardwalk is really nice.  The town has a lot of potential and we are going to enjoy getting to relax here.  Our plan is to be here for two nights, so some time to get to enjoy town.

The girls really like it here and are looking forward to hitting the beach in the morning, tomorrow.  There are several places that do coffee right against the beach so it will be easy for Dominica and I to relax with coffee while the girls play on the beach.  We found a bakery down the way as well.

It is Saturday and today is our day for exploring Dubrovnik, Croatia.  I was awake first to the right, Adriatic sunlight pouring in through the windows and set off for a long walk to explore the old city before anyone else woke up.  The girls were fast asleep when I left and Dominica was only awake enough to let her know that I was leaving but she was still in bed.

It was a really nice morning and I enjoyed the walk down to the fortress and I put in easily two hours walking around the old streets.  Lots of tourists were already there by the time that I got there and more just kept coming.  I learned later that Dubrovnik has recently become famous for being a key filming location for Game of Thrones which I have never seen and have no interest in, which explains the extremely high ratio of American tourists in an Eastern European location.  I also learned that Star Wars VIII has been filming here, which will make tourism increase that much more.  This means that last year, in Spain, we got to see one major Star Wars filming location and now we are seeing another and we are considering seeing yet another in the fall – none of which was intentional nor are we into those things.  We just keep stumbling upon them.

I looked around and found neat areas to bring the family and checked out the food options.  I managed to find a place that looked like it would be good for breakfast and let Dominica know.  The girls had woken up.  It was nine thirty.  So Dominica started getting them ready and I hoofed it back up the hill to the apartment so that I could meet them and help walk back down to the fortress.  Plus I had the keys and was needed to lock up the apartment before they could leave.

Even though the girls were awake at nine thirty it was still a bit of a race to get the entire family ready and all of the way down to the fortress in time to get to the restaurant before elven when they would stop serving breakfast.  We made it, though, with a good ten minutes to spare.

We sat out on the main square of Dubrovnik’s old town and had a wonderful breakfast.  Luciana was so hungry that she ordered a giant omelet, a chocolate filled croissant and a cheese sandwich!  We all really enjoyed our food and the coffee was awesome so we sat, relaxed and enjoyed that for a while.  It was a great way to start the day.

From there we hit the farmer’s market or whatever was going on in the square.  We got a few small things, but nothing much.  Then we spent an hour or so wandering the old streets.  It is a gorgeous old town, really something to see, and really extensive.  The scale of it is part of what is just so cool.  You cannot see it quickly.

Sadly a lot of it has been given over to television and movie themed souvenir shops that have nothing to do with the city at all.  Like so many touristy places, Chinese-made junk with the city’s logo printed on it is taking centre stage and the local stuff and the reasons for going there are fading.  Dubrovnik is not that bad yet, but it is very obvious that the last couple of years have turned something amazingly historic and awesome into something that most people see as gimmicky and cheap.  And nearly every overheard conversation is not someone talking about the history of Adriatic empires or the history of the seafaring people or how the fortifications work or how the city survived the famous siege only a few years ago or how the reconstruction is going; but rather nearly every conversation is someone talking about how they binged on an HBO show and which episode was filmed where.  It’s so sad to see such an important historical and living location to be thought of in those terms. Now it is just a place where cruise ships drop off loads of day trippers out to see where their favourite fiction show set up their cameras, instead of where actual history took place.

The city is a bit tough to walk with the kids.  There are a lot of cobblestones and a lot of elevation changes and steps.  The girls wanted to get candy so we ended up at Pirate Candy, which is a nice, but oddly themed American pirate candy store with barrels of candy and treasure chests hanging on the walls and such.  Why an American pirate theme in Croatia, I have no idea.  But the candy looked really good and the girls found some things that they wanted.

After a lot of walking around the girls were tired so we found an open square where people had vacated and the stalls closed up because the wind had picked up and was blowing tables over and let the girls just play for a bit.  They did well for twenty minutes but just as we were getting ready to go Liesl came from the bright sun of the square into the shadows where we were sitting, didn’t see a big rock and fell and hurt her knee badly.  She didn’t cut it or even cut her tights but it hurt a lot.  It will likely be a big bruise later.   So I had to carry her for quite a while and help her walk for a  long time.

That was it for the Miller family in the old city today.  We worked out way towards the way back, did some quick shopping, took a few last pictures and were on the way back up the hill.  We only went a little bit, though, because we have been promising Luciana for days that we would take her to the beach and there is a decent pebble beach on the north side of the fortress.  I had seen it last night and scoped it out on the walk this morning and figured out that it is a public beach and that we could go there.  We ended up entering the beach through a new restaurant, lounge and club that has been built on it, BanjeBeach.  We figured out that this, probably the best and most expensive restaurant in Dubrovnik (mostly guessing there, but it is a very reasonable guess if you saw the place) just opened last week!  It wasn’t busy as we were early so we sat on the tables just off of the beach and let the girls go play while we sat enjoying mojitos.  It was nice to get a chance to just sit with some drinks on the Adriatic.  The sun was out, the waves were nice, there was people watching to do and the girls were endlessly entertained by picking rocks out of the sand and building a wall and playing some game of their imaginations that we will never understand.  They easily put in an hour or two at this elaborate and very effortful game while we just relaxed.

We would have stayed longer, as we were really enjoying the break and the girls were having so much fun, but the place was booked for a wedding and we were going to be in the way.  I took each of the girls down and let them put their “toes in the sea”, which was way too cold for anything more, and we were off to walk back to the apartment.  We stopped quickly to pick up pastries and pizza to eat at the apartment which would be far cheaper than going out again and much less effort.

Back at the apartment we discovered that the Internet was out there and would remain off for the rest of the day.  So while we have basic communications via our cell phones with have unlimited and moderately fast 3G, we don’t have Internet access for our computers to do anything much.  So no uploading the pictures from the Nikon or getting things posted to SGL or doing any sort of work even though we are back at the apartment early and had been planning on doing some of that stuff.  And we had planned on really putting in some time looking for places to stay as we are leaving Croatia in the morning and need a place to head to in Montenegro, but don’t even know what city we are headed for, yet.

I was hot and tired so took a shower, I had not taken one earlier this morning, and when I was done the kids were tired.  We went down to the public area and took over the outside terrace (there is only one other room occupied at the facility and they were not in so we could spread out all that we wanted) with the girls at one table and Dominica and I at another and ate our dinner from the bakery.  Pizza, that we had to remove the ham from as no one sells anything without meat here, and some cakes and such.  It wasn’t bad.  Could have been better and less effort if they were not so crazy about not making a single thing without meat added to it.

We kept hoping that the Internet would come back so that we could do travel research, but it never did.  We sat outside using the one cell phone that was working, mine, and tried to find places in Montenegro that looked like they would be good for us.  We probably did that for about an hour with the girls having gone back up to the room so that they could watch recorded shows on their Kindle Fire tablets (they want to watch YouTube but that is not working) before they came down to tell us that they were lonely and wanted us to hang out with them.

I had set up my laptop out on the terrace and started working on getting caught up on writing about our trip around the Balkans which I will try to post once we get somewhere with Internet again.  Then I brought it up to the room and set up on the table in the middle of Dominica and my room and wrote from there most of the evening until a little after eleven while Dominica worked on finding our next place to stay.  She managed to book us a place in Montenegro for two nights, so we know that we are able to get up in the morning and head south and have a destination to get to and we know that we get to chill there for two nights again.  That will be nice.  Another day, another country.  We did some research on places to stay in Albania but have yet to come up with what region of the country we even want to get to visit.  And I need to do some research on getting into Macedonia with the car or how we can get around to Kosovo by train and I need to talk to friends there but without Internet access tonight that was a bit hard.  So that will wait until tomorrow.

We talked to the owner of the apartment about getting the car fixed here and he said that the nearest place to do so would be at the airport, which sits on the Montenegrin border thirty five kilometres away.  Dubrovnik is expensive and difficult to deal with things because it is such a tourist area so we are hesitant to try to get the car fixed here.  It seems like it makes more sense to do it in cheaper, easier, more laid back Montenegro than to do it here.  So our current plan is to try to swing by the Ford dealer near the airport as we go by tomorrow in the hopes that they can just get us in and fix whatever is wrong.  If they cannot then we continue on to Montenegro in the bright sun of day and figure things out from there.

It was a very busy day and Luciana was asleep long before ten.  Liesl was asleep just after ten.  And Dominica was nearly asleep at eleven.  I wrote more then ten thousand words before turning in for the night.  That is a good chunk of catching up.

Even getting to bed on the late side, around two in the morning, we were up at eight today.  Dominica had the idea that we would lug the luggage up the hill on the early side so that we could get that out of the way and be able to check out of the apartment and then be free to see Sarajevo while the car was still parked.  That was we would not be rushed and not miss things that we wanted to see.  This made sense to me and felt like it would make the day a bit more relaxed so we did that.

Getting the luggage all packed and up the hill was no small thing.  The luggage is heavy, we have one of the large suitcases, packed to over twenty five kilograms, and the smaller red suitcase, the giant purple backpack loaded to the hilt and the sling bag.  It is a lot to carry and going up the steep hill was exhausting.  But when it was done I was very glad that we had done it.  We were able to go back and check out of the apartment and be footloose and fancy free early on, making it very easy to explore the old town.

It was after nine, but not late at all, when we set out to explore the city.  We walked around the amazing old town for a while.  Sarajevo in the daylight is just as exciting and awesome as we felt like it was last night in the dark.  What a cool city.  The old town is almost entirely pedestrian with all of the expected shops, restaurants, cafes, gelaterias, twisting old streets, mosques, churches and museums that you expect in a place like this.

Our two biggest thing that we wanted to see this morning are the bridge where Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated and where World War I began, and to find someplace to get breakfast.  There are tons and tons of street cafes in Sarajevo but finding something with the kind of breakfast that we wanted was pretty hard to do.  We ended up walking around for a while and finding the bridge where the duke was killed before we found a place to eat.

We settled on an empty restaurant on a back street for some food.  Turns out that it was empty for a reason, the food was not very good.  The owner was friendly but the food was all just like frozen vegetables heated up for us and such.  No one really liked their meals but I got a salmon steak that was actually quite good.  So I made out well while everyone else got a cheap, frozen meal at best.  It was fine, just not what we were hoping for eating on the street in Sarajevo’s old town.

We did not stay for long, we have a very busy day with a lot of driving to do ahead of us.  So by half past twelve we had hiked back up the hill to find our car.

When we went to get into the car we noticed that the passenger window was wide open.  Dominica had jumped out so quickly last night that she had forgotten to close it and Mohammad and driven it and parked it for us in the tight space and had not closed it either.  I had just been handed the keys and had not inspected the car after we unloaded the luggage.  And somehow we did not notice the window being wide open (wide open is harder to spot than half open) when we loaded the car up with luggage this morning.  So it has sat all night and all morning being wide open and no one messed with it at all. And while this is a back street, it is a busy one with foot and car traffic constantly.

The drive out of Sarajevo was an awesome one.  We got to do the length of the city down in the valley so went out of the old town and into the new parts of the city and got to see a lot of different style areas and neighbourhoods including the government buildings (including the famous one in the pictures that was destroyed by artillery fire during the war.)  Even the new parts of Sarajevo seem like a really cool city.  This seems like the kind of city that you would really want to live in.

Going out of the city we followed the train for a bit and then headed back up into the mountains.  It was another nice drive, but not as nice as last night, but tons of mountains and beautiful areas.  It was only a few hours and we were down to Mostar.

Mostar is famous for its Stari Most or old bridge which is very old and rather unique and famous for people jumping off of it.  There is an old town (Stari Grad) near the bridge which is very quaint and cool, too.  Rick Steves has covered Mostar quite a bit so we know it well from his show.  Mostar is the big travel destination in Bosnia and was on our route to southern Croatia so we wanted to be sure to get to see it while we were in the area.  It would have been a shame to have missed it.  From Rick Steve’s Best of Europe I always had the impression that Mostar was a small place but it is one of the largest cities in Bosnia and rather large.

The terrain down in Mostar is completely different from that around Sarajevo or north.  Those areas are green and lush in high mountains.  The Mostar area has much lower mountains and it is very dry looking more like the drier areas of Spain, for example, or of Crete.

It took a bit of driving around to figure out how to get to the old bridge area.  Once we were there, though, it was easy with municipal parking guiding us as to where to go.  Parking was about five Euros for an hour, which was all that we figured that we would need.

From the parking the walk to the bridge was really quick.  We went into the old town and discovered that it had been turned into a horrible tourist trap complete with hawkers and kids begging for money (kids who were not poor, just begging because that’s what kids do in tourist areas.)  It’s awful.  It’s uncomfortable being there and completely pointless.  Sure the old town is gorgeous and old and really neat, but they have done such a terrible job letting it turn into an endless tourist trap and not having the necessary tourism police like Morocco does to deal with the “tourism begging” problem and not keeping hawkers from harassing people there is no reason to be there.  The place is packed with tourists all there to see people pretend to jump off of a bridge (people really do jump, but not very often and most people just get tricked into waiting or paying for something that never happens.)  Someone did jump while we were there, but we had gotten lucky.

We walked on the bridge, took a picture, grabbed ice cream, shooed away some beggar kids who, not getting much from us after much yelling “hey chico, hey chico… “ and a hand out demanding that I give him money, immediately went over and bought themselves ice cream and treats because, in reality, they aren’t poor but are rich off of foolish tourists.  I was not impressed.

We got back to the car, the whole trip having taken about forty five minutes, and drove out of Mostar.  My impression of it is that it is really just famous for being famous and there is no reason to really come here.  I have no idea why guidebooks even mention it and I’m a bit disappointed that Rick Steves made such a point of it as to put it in his show.  This isn’t the best of Europe, this is literally the worst little patch of Bosnia that we were able to find.  We drove across the entire country, it was all wonderful and gorgeous except for right here – the one place that everyone tells you to go.  Why?  The bridge is neat and historic, definitely, but worth a special trip?  Heck no.  You are lucky if it is worth getting out of your car to see.

Of course Mostar is somewhat famous for being the site of some of the most brutal fighting of the Bosnian Civil War and the bridge that we came to see, the Stari Most, was actually blown up and the one that is here now is a recent recreation (making it all the less sensible to take the time to go and see it.)  It’s awesome that the recreated it like exactly as it was before, but the sad fact is that it is still just an excellent recreation and not the real thing.  It’s terrible that Mostar lost its landmark, but their tourism system is so bad that I don’t feel as badly as I should about the whole thing.  We did get to see several houses that were still riddled with bullet holes and holes left from artillery rounds.  For the past twenty years this has been the calling card of Bosnia but much of the country has managed to patch this up and this face of the country is starting to disappear.  Around Mostar, much of it remains.  Why, we don’t know.  But from the little we have seen of the country our guess is that most of the country wants to fix what is broken, clean things up and move on to a bright future as a peaceful, wonderful country and Mostar feels like it might be leaving the scars of the war in place to draw attention to itself and try to capitalize on the human drama making war a tourist attraction.

My recommendation is to come see Bosnia, it’s amazing, but bypass Mostar.  Even if you are in the region, drive on by.  Go see the wine country, don’t join the throngs of tourists looking at recreations and people jumping into a river.  It’s just a silly way to spend your time.  Don’t waste your time in Bosnia on this.
We stopped at a gas station as we left town because Luciana had to use the facilities.  We fueled up while we were there.  When we went to leave we had a terrible discovery – our low beams no longer worked.  The car was actually throwing an error that the low beams were gone.  I got out and checked them out and discovered that it was worse than that… the low beams are gone completely and the high beams have one light out!  How did this happen?  Three lights going out in an hour?  We had four lights driving last night, no errors until now and the first error that we get and three of four lights are no longer functioning?  This is crazy.

Thank goodness that we had decided to do everything today on an early schedule in the hopes of getting to Dubrovnik early enough that we could scope it out, get to bed and get up early and see the city tomorrow.  This put us leaving Mostar at three in the afternoon, plenty of time to get to Dubrovnik before the sun goes down.  We cannot have the car looked at in Bosnia because we have no idea where or how to do that, we already have a place to stay in Croatia and if we attempt to stop somewhere we will easily get stuck with the sun going down and having an undriveable car.  This could get very bad, very quickly.

So we pulled out of Mostar and raced across western Bosnia to get to Croatia before it got dark.  We decided that we would put in two nights in Dubrovnik so that we would have time to figure things out as this makes everything a lot more complicated.  We have plenty of spare time built into our schedule so there is no problem spending extra time.  We have made good time thus far and we are really interested in seeing Dubrovnik so are not sad at all to spend extra time there.

We crossed the border into Croatia, our twenty fifth country, and the girls twenty third, around five but still had a very long drive along the coast left to go.  The border crossing was about the easiest ever.  It was a little station along an empty road.  We came upon it with no warning and even when we got there it was unclear that it was the border.  We only guessed that it was the border because there was a little guard station and sign that said “no pictures.”  Even going through Bosnian exit control and Croatian border control there was nothing obvious as to what was happening nor was anything said.  We handed over our passports to first Bosnia then to Croatia and they looked through them, approved them and handed them back waving us through.  That was it.  Not even a stamp in them.  Not even a welcome to Croatia or a thanks for visiting Bosnia.  Not a welcome sign or anything.  So weird.  And this was crossing from the independent Bosnian nation into the European Union, as well, but not the Schengen area.

Going into Croatia was interesting.  We first went along a river into a broad, flat valley surrounded by mountains and then climbed up the mountains to take the highway south along the river.  This is what I would call “Croatia Proper”, the mainland portion of Croatia rather than the enclave in which Dubrovnik sits.  We have to cross another strip of Bosnia before getting to that.  Bosnia and Croatia are very odd down in this area although if you really study a map it makes a little bit more sense when you realize that the mainland of Croatia and the enclave to the south are basically connected by the sea and there is a string of islands that hooks them all together.  Dubrovnik, if treated as being just another Croatian island, makes perfect sense.

Once we got up into the Croatian mountains the view back towards the valley was, to put mildly, epic.  This is one of the greatest views I have ever seen.  The mountains were high and circled this very large, flat valley with this neat river running through it to the Adriatic Sea.  So. Freaking. Cool.

The drive through the mountains was not too bad and the scenery was amazing.  This is our first time on the east side of the Adriatic.  We have been to Venice before, up in the north, but this is the eastern side with the amazing sunsets.  This is the part of the Adriatic that we are most interested in.  Italy might be the famous coast and the longest, but the Croatian and old Yugoslavian coast, as well as Albanian, has the better position along it.  And both does this drive show it off.  And so much of it was empty.  It was amazing how few settlements we found along some of the world’s great sea coast.

We thoroughly enjoyed this drive.  One of the things that is very worth noting is how incredibly different the landscapes of the three major Yugoslavian components are.  Serbia is almost entirely a flat plain of farmland.  Bosnia is all mountains. Croatia is all about the sea.  Each is totally unique.

We had to pass through a tiny sliver of Bosnia where that country touches the Adriatic itself.  Border control here was bigger, but just as simple, as our last passing into Croatia.  Two minutes and we were through.  Even Canada makes it harder than this.  Of course I’m sure that drugs, weapons and crime are far more common coming from the US than from Bosnia, so Canada has a lot more to worry about.

The Bosnian stretch along the sea feels weird just because it looks just like the most amazing seaside, clinging to the cliffs Adriatic villages that you picture in Italy and Croatia but is in Bosnia, a country that you do not picture with a coastline like this at all.

After the brief stretch in Bosnia we had one more border to do, back into Croatia and we were on our way down to Dubrovnik, Croatia’s most famous city.  This drive section would have gone much more quickly but the road is so windy that you realistically cannot pass on it and we got stuck behind a slow moving truck literally the entire way and right behind him were two cars without the balls to pass it making a line of three cars that was so much harder to pass than just the truck on its own would have been.  They were so problematic that they created a line of cars backed up for what was probably over a mile.  Amazing how one slow truck and one foolish car driver that follows too closely to him but will not pass can impact an entire highway.   They actually changed the flow of traffic into Dubrovnik for thirty minutes or so!

We finally got into the city and managed to get pretty close to the apartment that we have booked for tonight.  The city clings to the hillside against the sea so is all very tough streets and tight spaces.  We parked where we could find a space and Dominica sent me out to locate the apartment and, hopefully, a parking space before we moved the car closer and possibly got stuck looping around the city again.

I had a problem finding the place and ended up walking several kilometres down a steep hill, all of the way to the old city centre and then climbing some crazy stairs and coming back to the car from above. It was exhausting and took a lot of time to do.  I was looking for number sixteen and had managed to find fifteen and seventeen but not sixteen.  This was pretty awful.  At least I managed to get back to the car.

We did some calling, texting and Dominica walked down the hill and had the guy come out and wave and then coordinated moving the car down to where she was and we were able to park it.  It was getting dark at this point but I had gotten the fog lights working and there was light traffic and we were on well lit one way streets so the lights being out wasn’t an issue.  We only needed people to see the car from behind and the rear lights were fine.

We got parked and were thankful to be out of the car.  It is right across the street from the apartment so unloading the luggage was no problem at all this time.  We got moved in and everyone was ready to relax for a  while, but not for too long as we were all hungry.

The apartment is great.  The owner had two apartments available and so showed us both so that we could pick which would be a better fit for us.  As usual, the girls did the deciding and chose the first one that we were shown, a two bedroom, one bath apartment with one view directly onto the sea and another off to the side onto the old town.  It’s a gorgeous little place and downstairs in the common area is a really neat terrace sitting area that sits right on out the sea.  It’s a nice spot.

We decided that we all wanted to go eat dinner in the old town which is where the apartment owner recommended.  It is a bit of a walk, maybe fifteen minutes, down to the old town.  Walking to it is easy, it is all down hill.  Walking back is the fun bit.  A constant up hill march to return.

We got to the old city and entered the old fortress.  This is quite an amazing structure.   Dubrovnik was a contemporary and competitor with Venice and is one of the only cities strong enough to have managed to have fended off Venetian advances for hundreds of years and Ottoman advances for a long time as well.  The fortress of Dubrovnik was built originally to protect the city from the Venetians and the fortress as it stands was reinforced against the later Ottoman Turks.  It is massive and the entire old city is inside of its walls.  The entire structure remains intact, even after it was shelled by the Yugaslav army less then twenty five years ago.  The shelling of the city being the event that really brought global attention to the regional war of independence.

We started looking at restaurants as soon as we entered the fortress and found one pretty quickly that had some decent vegetarian options that would keep us happy so even though it was expensive and fancy we just decided to eat there, even with the kids.  We sat outside on the pier so we could see the sea and get fresh air.  It was quite nice and our dinner of sea bass, Dominica and I both got the same thing, and calamari for Luciana and penne with vegetables for Liesl went over quite well.  We did not feel like we were out late at all but we had the absolute only kids at dinner and by the time that we left the full restaurant with hundreds of diners only had one table of two women left when we left ourselves.  Apparently we just closed down Dubrovnik, with our little kids, on our first night here.

We walked back up to the apartment, which was a very tiring walk (especially as I have done this a couple of times now) and got ourselves settled in to bed.  We were off to sleep sometime around midnight.

We woke up this morning to a gorgeous day in Timisoara, Romania.  We are all very excited as our first new country lies just about an hour away to the south.  It is Thursday and we really have only the loosest of plans which is exactly how a good road trip should be.  It has been a long time since we did anything like this.  We did a small trip this past weekend, but a weekend trip is nothing like this.  Lots of people do weekends trips, maybe not at as much of a drop of a hat as we do, but they do them.  But we are doing more countries in a week than most people do in a lifetime.  So, this is a little bit crazy.

We did pretty well this morning, having very little to do.  None of us had a tonne of sleep having gotten in so late last night but we were dressed and out the door and on the road before ten, maybe even around nine, which gave us nice morning sunlight for our drive.

The land to the south of Timisoara (we started this morning south of the city) and towards Serbia is very flat.  Romania, on this morning’s drive, was golden fields in full bloom.  Some of the biggest, yellowist endless fields stretching out to the horizon.  Very stunning.  We were surprised at how different it looks here than anywhere in Romania that we have been thus far.

It was still late morning when we arrived at the Serbian border.  The border crossing was painless.  We went through a Romanian exit control that looked at our car papers and such but was very easy.  Then went through the Serbian border with nothing more than a quick glance at our passports by a border agent who was engrossed in a conversation on his cell phone so we were not going to get the third degree for sure as he just wanted to make sure we were legal and move us along, which he did.  And we are into Serbia!

We were shocked to discovered that for the first half of an hour at least, in Serbia, we encountered no one.  Just, no one.  It was an empty, but beautiful, place.  No cars, no people, no houses.   Just flat, nicely maintained fields.  The lack of people crossing the largest Romanian – Serbian border crossing point (the point that connects Serbia’s capital and largest city with its nearest Romanian counterpart and one of Romania’s largest cities) had zero traffic in either direction.  No one was at the border crossing with us, either, of course.  At least on the Romanian side of the border there was local traffic so people were everywhere, right up to the crossing.  But in Serbia, it was a hinterland, to say the least.

Eventually we spotted a neat Serbian village along the base of a small mountain off in the distance to the left which would be roughly south west and then, in not too long, we came upon a small city that we drove right through.  The city was nice, poorly market as far as where the road went through it, but the city itself was pretty and pleasant and appeared to be quite a nice place.  Lots of nice houses.

Every country has its own style, of course, and Serbia heavily resembles the village and city structure of Romania but with a slightly different architectural flair and an odd mix of Romanianesque houses mixed with giant in-village Serbian McMansions that are rather surprising to discover.  We find that discovering these unique differences in countries and regions to be endlessly entertaining.  You can really identify where you are by the houses and village structure if you are used to different area.

We did not stop in northern Serbia and sped right on to the capital, Belgrade (Beograd), the White City.  I sent a message to a friend (from Spiceworks) who lives in Belgrade but we were unable to make connections before we had passed through the city.   We knew that our time was short so we are not stopping in Belgrade on this trip but we did want to pass through it and get to see it.  Belgrade is such an important city that we did not want to miss it, but Serbia is not a major destination on this grand tour , plus we plan to be back in Serbia in a week’s time, anyway.  So who knows where we might be staying at that point or what we might get to see.

We only got the drive-through of Belgrade but what we saw was very nice and the downtown area was really impressive.  Belgrade is the old Yugoslavian capital and has the infrastructure that you would imagine from that history; and it remains the capital of Serbia which is the largest of the countries to be derived from the old conglomeration.  It is a large, well maintained and impressive city with giant buildings and good roads.  We hope to get a chance to return and explore it more thoroughly some day.

Leaving Belgrade we drove past the airport and stopped for gas and some chips and such from the gas station so that we could eat in the car.  The girls were getting hungry but we did not want to stop in Belgrade itself because that would have been complex with parking and finding a good place.  So our deal was that we were going to look for a restaurant to stop at once we were past the city and then we could get a late lunch and a break from the car.

Oddly, we actually ended up crossing the entire country without finding a place to eat.  We started seeing some in the west, but because of the time of day none appeared to be open!  That is the problem with travelling in Europe, you often hit different regions where things are all closed at certain times of the day; then you go on to another region when everything is closed at another time and soon nothing is open for you at all.

So without intending to, we flew through Serbia with blinding speed and within a few hours found ourselves driving along the river looking at Bosnia on the other side and then went right past our nearly inivisible border crossing and had to turn around and go back.  Serbia was a very pretty country and seems really nice, and we got to see all of it from edge to edge including seeing the capital and largest city as well as the touristy western area where the flat plains start to turn into mountains.

It was late afternoon when we turned into the Bosnian border crossing and got our first issue of the trip – our green card does not cover Bosnia (nor Macedonia or Kosovo, it turns out) and we have an insurance problem.  Bosnia was also not exactly impressed that our green card was a copy and not the original.

So we got pulled over and stuck in border control.  Dominica had to stay with the girls in the car and I was sent off on foot to look for insurance.  I did not understand the instructions that I was given too clearly and did a bit of walking around without being able to find the insurance place and then had to go back to the border without the insurance.

Border control was laughing at me when I returned because they were able to see me walking all around being lost.  They gave me new directions and I was able to figure to go this time and I managed to get three days of Bosnian insurance for twenty one Euros, got my paperwork and was able to present it to Bosnian border control and they let us into the country.  They were very friendly and helpful and clearly interesting in putting on a good experience for people entering the country.

The moment we crossed into Bosnia we were presented with amazing views of the mountains across the river in the low sunlight.  The road that we were taking turned to the south and ran down along the river hugging the river as mountains spilled down to the river so there were a lot of tunnels and winding parts.

After about twenty minutes into Bosnia we ended up in stopped traffic. There had been an accident in a tunnel somewhere in front of us and we were stuck. No one was going anywhere.  I got out of the car to investigate since the whole road was people out of their cars.  It looked like we were going to be there for hours.  So we turned around and drove back up, all of the way to the border crossing and went another way, the long way around which took us up into the hills on smaller roads.  Not ideal and we lost a lot of time, but at least we were moving.

Eventually we got out onto something of a highway and in the late afternoon we managed to find a truck stop motel that seemed nice.  Luciana had a bathroom pit stop emergency so we had to ask for a bathroom and it turned out to be in the first floor restaurant and since we were already up there Liesl and I looked at a menu and we decided that since we had missed all of the meals all day and we were already here that this is where we should eat.  It was a big complex along the highway but we were the only people in the rather large restaurant.

We got pizzas, two of them in fact, plus a big bowl of pasta, four coffees (the girls did not drink coffee but Dominica and I each had two) and then we wrapped up the meal with a traditional Bosnian dessert and we were amazing to discover that the Bosnian Konvertable Marke (KM) is two to the Euro and the entire meal came out to a whopping fourteen dollars!  That is making the trip very cheap, very quickly if that is all that things cost in Bosnia.  This is awesome.

We tried a traditional Bosnia dessert called hurmašica which was quite good.

All of the drive in Bosnia was stunning.  The landscape lacks anything resembling the concept of flat.  Bosnia is, in would appear, the anti-flat country.  We knew that Bosnia was the mountainous centre of the old Yugoslavia and that what made it Bosnia was the mountain culture that had developed there, so we were not entirely surprised by this.  But the degree to which Bosnia is mountains is a bit extreme.  The part that we saw was entirely mountains, from edge to edge.  Nothing but mountains.  And mostly really high mountains, too.

We got to see a lot of really stunning Bosnian terrain before the sun went down.  Our goal for tonight is to get to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital.  It is one of our “must see” Bosnian destinations.

It was turning to darkness as we climbed into the really high Bosnian mountains.  Much of what we saw, especially as it was getting dark, was what appeared a lot like a combination of slightly modified Swiss chalets mixed in with mosques, mosques everywhere.  A lot of churches, too, but so many mosques.  Minarets dot the skyline much like you expect steeples in a New England painting.

The drive through the mountains was a bit much for Dominica who felt awful from her motion sickness for much of the drive. We did go through some incredibly beautiful (at least at night) small cities up in the mountains.

It was something like nine in the evening when we came into Sarajevo.  We were surprised to find that it looked a lot like Ithaca, New York, but ten times the size.  It has a similar “downtown in the valley, houses on the hills” feeling that Ithaca does.  It’s a very vertical city.  When you are dowtown you don’t see stars above you, you see more of the city up in the sky.  Driving along one of the ridges you got lots of light coming at you from the side from the wall of the city rising on the opposite ridge.  I love cities like this, it is like you can see all of the city from anywhere in the city.  It really gives you a feeling of being in the place and feeling connected to everyone else because you can see so much more of the city than you normally can.

We drove around a lot trying to figure out where our apartment for the night is.  Dominica got one of the “Genius Deals” tonight which got us what appeared to be an amazing apartment right in the old city (stari grad) for just seventeen dollars American which seems impossible.

Sarajevo has terrible driving.  Tight, steep streets, twisting and turning all over the place.  It is impossible to navigate and nearly impossible to drive.  Very stressful and the city is full of people who know their way around and think that you are in the way.  Not fun driving at all.

The apartment owners were not able to coordinate someone to get us into the apartment for about half an hour after we arrived so we found a quiet spot to park and sat for a little while which I really appreciated since I was exhausted from having driven the entire day (other than the hiking around that I had done looking to get us Bosnian car insurance) and this last bit of driving was fatiguing me very quickly.  So this was a good break before having to do it again.

We met up with Mohammad showing us the apartment at a quarter till ten.  The apartment is actually down on a main street, so easy to deal with, but hard to get to and from.  We were told that there would be simple on site parking but when we got there Mohammad discovered someone parked in his garage so he had to find us street parking up in the twisting hillside streets.  Ugh.

We found a back street and he helped us park on a sidewalk up against a building.  What a way to have to deal with your car here.  He loaded us up in his car and drove us back to the apartment with our luggage.  Who knows how we will deal with the luggage tomorrow.  The car is way up the hill and we won’t have a chauffeur to get us up to it in the morning.

We got into the apartment which was totally gorgeous.  Very cool place in an ancient building right next to the country’s oldest mosque and the city’s big library which itself is a bit of a landmark.  The apartment has one entrance on to the main street and the back entrance goes straight into the old town!  Very neat.  The apartment itself was quite comfortable with a big living room with a convertible couch for the girls and a bedroom for Dominica and me.

Once Mohammad was done getting us settled in, he took off.  Then I went for a walk up the hill to make sure that I knew how to find the car again and how to drive the car back to the apartment because any wrong turn tomorrow could result in my getting lost and being unable to get back to the apartment which would be a major problem.

It was a bit of a walk, mostly because of the steep incline and crazy back streets.  But I found the car without too much effort.  On the way back to the house I went past the nation’s oldest Orthodox church, took a picture of it while I was there, and then came upon a late night bakery that was still open!  By this time it was actually after midnight, we lost a lot of time dealing with the logistics of getting into the apartment, and I stopped in to see what they had because we had not managed to get any food today except for the late lunch stop at the truck stop.  The girls were looking for food but we had just not had any reasonable opportunity to tackle that until this point.

I got a load of different pastries.  There are a lot of pastries that seem to be common to the entire Balkan region as much of it is the same as far down in Greece.  I got several different things hoping that the girls would like something.

I got back to the apartment and we set up the food in the living room and ate.  The surprise find was that both girls liked the potato filled filo pastries.  We all ate and then got the girls tucked into bed.

Our night did not stop there, however.  We quickly found that our toilet broke and would not stop running nor would it flush.  Something in the flushing mechanism was stuck but we could not fix it nor even get it open to look at.  One of the dangers of being in a new region is that simple things like toilets are often wildly different than you have ever seen before and you have no context for working on them.  Fixes that might be simple to someone local might seem impossible.  These toilets are fairly American-like in style except that they flush with a start/stop button and this one got jammed into the start position and there was no way to push the stop (nor could it stop on its own like it is supposed to.)  The idea that you can stop it short is very handy, until it breaks.

So we contacted the owner of the apartment, but he did not know how it worked either and we spent a lot of time trying to explain what was wrong and trying to explain that we were not stupid Americans that could not figure out how to press the stop button.  While we were trying to figure that out, we discovered that the hot water was not working either.  Not that it wasn’t hot, there was none.  If you put a faucet into the hot position no water would flow.  It is going to be a long night.

Dominica and I put in a lot of time doing plumbing troubleshooting.  We might have been at it, talking to the owner via WhatsApp, for nearly an hour.  We checked all of the plumbing everywhere, drained the hot water tank (it had less than a cup of water in it), took the wall plate off to see if there was something wrong back there and more.  Finally I managed to get the toilet taken apart, found the part that was stuck and managed to get the thing flushing manually, so at least we had some way to use the bathroom, now.

So it was nearly two when we turned in to go to bed.  Tomorrow we have a lot of driving to be doing as well, so we want to get some sleep but still get up early enough to visit the city of Sarajevo in the daylight before getting into the car to drive south to Mostar and Dubrovnik, Croatia.  We are working hard to get all of the big driving done right up front so that we can spend time exploring the lesser known portions of the Adriatic coast.

Today represented two more countries for the Miller family.  For Dominica and me that was countries twenty three and twenty four.  Liesl and Luciana are now up to twenty two.  According to Lonely Planet, we have now been to ten percent of all of the world’s countries.

We were very tired when we finally fell asleep in Sarajevo, Bosnia.  We did notice that on this trip we crossed back from Eastern European time, that we have been on since the first of January to Central European time.  So we gained an hour on our drive which was nice this direction but will not be nice going back.  We are one hour closer to back home, now.

It was a really gorgeous day in Baita this morning.  Getting the whole family to bed so early last night worked out well.  Everyone was up and ready early today.  Even Liesl was up before nine!  Luciana, however, got up and went back to bed and slept until noon.  She was clearly overly tired last night and needed a full twelve hours of sleep!

Dominica made the coffee and then joined me at my desk to talk about our upcoming travel plans to the Balkans.   We have had a rough idea of what we have wanted to do in mind for a while but sketched out the route and the stops today so that we could figure out how much we would need to schedule.  It is eight countries in about eight days, quite an undertaking.

After doing all of the plans and figuring out when Easter (which is the first of May here) was going to interrupt things we decided that it actually made the most sense for us to pack up and leave… today!

So a slow Wednesday turned into rather a hectic one.  Dominica had just done a load of laundry and was about to put it out on the line to dry.  That needed to be dry before we would be able to consider leaving.  And there is a lot of packing to be done, of course.  And just a lot to prep for an eight day, eight country excursion.  This is going to be crazy.  Like a smaller, but similar trip to our one in Europe in 2012.  This is a lot of countries, only one fewer than that one, in a much shorter window of eight days instead of six weeks.

So a bit of a crazy day trying to get everything ready to go and think of all of the things that need to be ready to deal with a massive travel undertaking like this.  What is funny is that while this is a bit of an epic trip, we don’t really feel like it is much of an undertaking.  Seven countries that we’ve never been to, all of which use an alphabet that we don’t know how to read, a few of which have poor road infrastructure, two language families we’ve never dealt with before and one break away republic with disputed borders.  And… who needs to plan?  Not us.  Pack some bags, jump in the car and book hotels while on the move.  Yee haw.

I had a call and was done at seven thirty, quite early for me on a Wednesday.  Dominica was all ready.  We went out to get into the car and our priest, Yakov (we don’t know how he spells it) was walking by.  I went out to inform him that we would be gone for a while so that no one would worry and he had me grab the girls because he had brand new baby piglets that were just born yesterday for us to go see!

We went to the farm for about half an hour.  It set us back on our time table rather a bit but boy was it worth it.  None of us have seen baby piglets up close and personal before and for eleven of them to be one day old and right next door was an experience not to be missed.

So it was after eight when we piled into our little Ford Focus and hit the road.  Late but not terribly late.  A decent enough time for starting on a major adventure.  Tonight definitely starts an adventure.

It was getting pretty dark when we set off.  We only had to go a very short distance, maybe ten minutes, before we turned off of the path that we knew and were off onto new roads into a new area of Romania and off to explore yet more of Eastern Europe.

Tonight’s driving goal, which is reasonably ambitious, is to make it all of the way to Timisoara in the far west of Romania.  The estimated drive was over six hours, which is nothing small, even for daytime driving.  This was almost entirely in the dark.

Sadly, we decided to use Google Maps to give us directions rather than just looking at the map.  This would turn out to be the first of many horrific driving decisions made by Google on this trip.  Instead of taking us on easy, large highways that would have gotten us to Timisoara pretty quickly, Google sent us off into the wilderness where we took one back road after another, many were not even paved.  This is bad enough under normal conditions but we are not used to these roads, do not know the area at all and Romanian roads, especially smaller ones, are full of people, dogs and horse drawn carts which have no reflectors on them normally so they are almost impossible to see in the near total darkness, which there is a lot of as most roads have no street lights.

The drive was a very, very slow one and incredibly stressful as I had to be insanely alert looking for all kinds of things in the road and always having to deal with slow trucks and fast people trying to pass us in the darkness and unmarked railroad tracks.  It was not a trivial drive to do for a long time all at night.  During the day this would not have been nearly so bad.

It was a challenging night, but we did eventually make it out to Timisoara after passing through several areas that were new to us.  We saw very few large settlements the entire way but did go through a couple of really neat small cities before getting out to our destination.

Driving through Timisoara was a bit of a goal, even though it is a very large city, because it is the home of the world’s fastest Internet access and it is a city that we are very interested in as a potential home in Romania because it is well situated in a great location, has great Internet, is a good size, etc.

Our goal was to get through the city and find a hotel on the far side of it to get as much of the driving out of the way tonight as possible but we did not want to try to tackle the Serbian border in the middle of the night – always an important driving tip.

Just a little ways south of the city we saw what looked like a nice hotel on the side of the road, the Hotel Aurelia.  Big and sort of fancy, the kind of place that would have all night staff.  So we pulled in and everyone stayed in the car while I went into investigate the potential situation.  I managed to get a giant room with a king bed for a pretty good price and since we were willing to skip breakfast we did not have to pay for the kids at all.

It was about two in the morning when we crashed at the hotel.  We were very ready to be out of the car.  The hotel room was great, we were glad that we chose this place.  It was very comfortable and the girls always prefer when we have a king bed because we have the space to all snuggle together.

Oddly, this nice, modern hotel had no power available near the head of the bed so I had to connect my CPAP to the wall on the other side of the room and we had to reverse the direction in which we slept for it to all work.