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| Inigo Montoya |
Some days, I want to rip that little electronic box of wires and pixels from the windshield and put it on the gravel road it told us to turn onto. And an anonymous female voice with the programmed American accent will say, voice cracking, "Recalculating" and I'll say "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die..." and I'll stomp on it with 2" wooden soled Dutch clogs until the screen is shattered and the wires are poking out of it like an electrified sea anemone.
Getting to Dubrovnik was a problem, thanks to the GPS. It first misdirected us outside of Omis, and I won't get into it because we were partially at fault. I'll just say that the GPS cost us over an hour, but we saw some gorgeous mountain/gorge scenery. Because of the GPS fiasco, we now have rafting down the Cetina river on our next Croatia itinerary.
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| Cetina river gorge in Omis |
The next GPS disaster was in Dubrovnik, when it directed us downhill to our hotel through a 2 km long warren of narrow curving alleys, that eventually ended up as a dead end. There was NOWHERE to turn around. While it was slightly wider than the Vis road, we ended up driving the stick shift in reverse, uphill, in the dark at 11PM. After about 1/2 hour of this torture, with my mouth totally parched, I noticed that a locked gate (I checked the lock on the way down when we were considering exit strategies), a potential turnaround point, was unlocked and open. A woman was there with her adult handicapped son in a wheelchair. I asked if she spoke English and then in sign language, asked if we could turn around in her driveway. She said yes, and then got her husband, who spoke excellent English, while Adam turned the car around. Thankfully, her husband directed us to the street on which our apartment was located. We found the street, but the apartment (Villa Rosa) was completely unmarked (no name, no building numbers, nothing), so we had to call the owners to find out if we were in the right spot and where we were supposed to park, and it was all just incredibly stressful and late and maddening. If it weren't for that nice Croatian family, we would probably still be backing out of that alley. Once we got in the apartment and found beds for all the kids, we thoroughly, completely enjoyed a glass of wine before collapsing in bed from the stress of the drive.
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| Square of the Loggia, Dubrovnik |
We only allowed one full day for Dubrovnik. With the time constraint, we bought a headset tour of the inside of the old city, and Adam listened to the mp3 player and then translated it into prose the kids could understand. We passed an hour or two in this fashion, admired the beautiful buildings, and were amazed that after the Homeland Conflict, over 2/3rds of the buildings in Dubrovnik had been war-damaged. We took a crepe break on the main square, right next to the Cathedral. On our entire trip, this was the only church I wanted to see the inside of and that's because this the church boasts an unusual relic - Jesus' nappy. That's British English for Jesus' diaper. With my religious irreverence, it's probably for the best that we couldn't find it, because I'd probably be stepping on some toes now if we had found it.
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| Waiting for the ferry at Lokrum |
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| Lokrum, Croatia |
When we were too hot to go on, we headed for the historic old harbor where we caught a boat to the nearby forested island of Lokrum. There are no houses, souvenir shops, hotels or stores on Lokrum, you go there to swim and enjoy all the coves and rocky projections on which you can sunbathe or dive into the water. Our intention was to let the kids swim during the hottest part of the day, and we all ended up in the beautiful water. We enjoyed watching all the tourists in the glass bottomed boats ignoring the glass bottom to stare at the nudist beach shoreline, which was not far from where we were camped. There were hundreds of peacocks and peahens prowling the island from the days when Emperor Maximillian (Franz Josef's brother who built Miramare Castle in Trieste, Italy but was killed by firing squad in Mexico) restored the monastery, allegedly built by Richard the Lionhearted in 1192. We left Lokrum late in the afternoon, fairly relaxed, and ready to find dinner in Dubrovnik. Dinner was unremarkable (something all our guidebooks warned us about), but we were ready to walk the city walls. The temperature had cooled down a bit and we walked the entire circuit, enjoying the views of the city from above, and hearing and seeing more Americans than we had heard since leaving the US.
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| Dubrovnik from the city walls, Lokrum in background |
We didn't set foot in a single museum, we just whiled away the afternoon in the Adriatic. And that was perfectly fine with all of us. One day in Dubrovnik was enough. We were ready to head home the next morning -- this time via the two lane ocean thoroughfare and not the mountain back alley route.
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| Mohawk boys |
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| Dubrovnik |
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| Collecting salt on Lokrum |
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| Peahen chicks |
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| City walls, Dubrovnik |
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| Still baking |
