Dubrovnik and Beyond

 

We were in Dubrovnik for just a short 3 day weekend. Why Dubrovnik? We are Game of Thrones fans and we had heard that the town was quite beautiful. Given that we weren’t going to have a lot of time we decided to keep it pretty local BUT because I’m so keen on getting passport stamps we did spend an entire day driving to Montenegro. I’m tempted to say we wasted the day since we spent about 5 hours in total just sitting on one side of the border or the other waiting to get through, but still it was fun to drive around and we saw the city of Kotor. We stayed at the Hilton which, in a later photo you can see was destroyed just 30ish years prior. It had a great view with a seaside balcony part of which face the old town and fully facing the sea. 

 

The next day we had a Game of Thrones tour scheduled for the afternoon, but I should note that during the peak of the day temps were reaching 40C and so it was really not fun to walk around. Most of our day we split between 7-11am and then 4pm and after in order to avoid the worst of it. So that morning we hopped a ferry to the island of Lokrum and spent the earlier part of the day walking around there and seeing what we could, old fortifications and some scenes from Game of Thrones. I don’t mean to be demur, the island was beautiful as was the sea. It just wasn't a whiz bang type of thing. You could easily, EASILY, spend a couple days there if you want to take it slow, swim a lot in the sea, and sip some expensive drinks. It was nice. 

 Arriving back around noon we headed to the comfort of our hotel the later headed out for the game of thrones tour. Our tour did not disappoint. The guide was knowledgeable and friendly and most of the other people on our small tour were also fans so knew enough about the show to make it fun.

 

On our final day in the city we woke early so we could be the first ones on the city walls. There is a counter clockwise walking path on top of the city wall and both for reasons to avoid people and to avoid the heat we started right when it opened at 9am. We moved pretty fast, but it still took until nearly 11am to complete the loop. I suppose we could have taken quite a bit longer but it is mostly wall and parapets and not much else along the way

Having some time to kill in the afternoon we did see a few more things, small museums in the town and such, but not much more.

The picture of our hotel, bombed out in the war and burned down. It is always interesting to consider time and place. It was not lost on me where we where and the history attached. I considered many place we could have gone to reflect that, but decided against it and to have a "nice trip" However, the war is in the cracks of society as we saw in this photo. Had Aya been sitting on the balcony as in the first photo of this post, things would have been very different.