I’m finally getting around to telling the rest of the story.
After getting off the boat in Split, we followed the signs out of town and toward Dubrovnik. I’m assuming it was one of the more popular destinations since there were signs for it everywhere.
On the map I had, there was only one main road that lead down the coast to Dubrovnik. I say “main” road, but it definitely was not a highway. Unlike the autobahns and autostratas we drove on in Germany, Austria and Italy, this road wound slowly down the coast passing through small fishing towns and villages, which, most of the time, never allowed you to go faster than 30 to 50 MPH (or 50 to 80 KPH). But, for the most part, we didn’t mind.
The villages were quaint and many times beautiful. Most of them had a least a few brightly colored boats bobbing in the water. I’m sure it would be even nicer in the summer.
Something that was impressive was the rolling hills that went all the way down to the water. I call them hills because they weren’t what we call mountains around here, but for the sake of giving you a real idea of what they looked like, they weren’t really rolling either.
They really looked like mounds of rocks. Almost as if it was the gravel pit of some very large giant. It wasn’t until you got close that you actually saw that there was dirt between the very large rocks, since from far away (and this being the end of winter) sometimes you could hardly see anything on them but some occasional scrubs. And many times the rocks weren’t smooth looking like what I was used to, but kind of angular and sticking far out of the hill — as if someone had just cut them out and thrown them there. Even the hills that were covered with green, were covered with low bushes and not tall tree like you see here in Germany. It was just very different.
I can’t, of course, forget the little part of Bosnia we had to go through on the way there. Since it is the only part of Bosnia on the coast, it was packed with houses, hotels and stores, just like any resort town would be.
And with the mention of Bosnia, I also need to mention that it didn’t take long for us to spot the houses and buildings that had been bombed or destroyed because of the fighting in these countries. We later found out that the Old Town of Dubrovnik had been damaged quite a bit, but you could also see how much work they were doing to put it back the way it was.
So, on this winding road, we finally reached Dubrovnik. It took us a little while to find out where we were staying, but once we did it was wonderful. Since this was a business trip for J., we were staying in the Hilton, right next to the Old Town which was quite picturesque. The room wasn’t bad either.
The room had a sitting area and they had put a rolling bed in for A. which didn’t block the flow of the room. Both of the beds had wonderfully soft feather comforters and pillows. We had three floor to ceiling windows that all lead out to a balcony with a wonderful view. It was much more luxurious than we had hoped for.
Since we got to the room a little before 1 p.m., and we hadn’t had much sleep the night before on the boat, we all crashed for an hour or two before wandering down for a meal in the hotel.
And here I’m going to stop again. The thing is, I like to put all the photos in and not miss the good ones or leave something out of the story, but doing that take a large amount of time on my part and that’s why I took so long in between posts, because I knew it would take a long time. Sorry about that!