Final Snapshot from Croatia: Dubrovnik and Goodbye

"It's time to say goodbye, but I think goodbyes are sad and I'd much rather say hello. Hello to a new adventure."- Ernie Harwell

So here we sit on a plane to Cologne reflecting on our three months in Croatia. I am not sure what I expected before we arrived though I had been told how beautiful it is here. We had planned to live a normal life, sending the kids to kindy and ballet classes for continuity and keeping travel to a minimum. Instead we explored the coast from top to bottom and also visited Hungary and Slovenia. While it has been busier than I expected we also made time to relax and enjoy the good life in the country

Living in a small hamlet in the countryside, exploring ruins, climbing trees, going on long walks and learning to speak Croatian through daily conversation with special people is a better education for a young child than kindergarten.

The companionship of your brother/sister  a dog and a village of people who are all related to you, no matter how distantly and are happy to see you everyday and will miss you when you are gone beats a ballet class hands down. We can have continuity when we get home, in Croatia we had something special that you just can't buy.

But before we leave Croatia I have one more visit to share, and so last and certainly not least here are our highlights of Dubrovnik.

Many years before I met Rob I worked with a young man who told me that I must put Dubrovnik on my bucket list and I have always remembered this advice and regretted that we hadn't fitted it in. However once we arrived in the village for our four week stay we realised that without heating we could freeze at night and so we ordered a pot bellied stove which would take two days to be delivered and so we jumped in the car and drove down to Dubrovnik.

Travelling in off season again paid off as we had our pick of accommodation and as we had our car to think about and were not keen for hiking miles up hill to the old town we decided to stay at a hotel on the bus route twenty minutes away. And so for the price of an apartment in the old town we stayed in an all-inclusive hotel much to the delight of the children. We were in fact we were amongst the last guests for the season and the day we left they closed down.

Our plan for the first morning was of course to walk the walls and again we were treated to brilliant weather. They say despite the fact that there was not much of a summer this year the overall average has been higher than normal due to a mild winter and now a beautiful autumn.

And so in the lovely sunshine we walked the walls, which need no explaining and so I will let them speak for themselves.

Unlike Split, with its spectacular Diocletian's Palace, hidden away and incorporated into the fabric of the city, Dubrovnik hides nothing and from the walls the whole city is on show.

The walk was much longer than we expected but it was worth it and there was a lot of places to rest. We have often wondered where all the tourists had got to when Trogir, Zadar and Sibernik had appeared as ghost towns. Well we certainly found them in Dubrovnik, by the bus and boat load.

After a quick trip back to the hotel for lunch and a rest we came back in the evening to explore by twilight, which comes early now.  We had been given Dubrovnik cards by fellow guests of our hotel who were leaving so we visited a museum in a lovely old palazzo which included a photographic exhibition of the city during the war in the early 1990's.

While we have been in Croatia we have seen much evidence of the damage done during this conflict and we have had disturbing conversations with a cousin, a school teacher for forty eight years, about the impact on her students of living in a war torn country. I believe the scars left on the country are less evident in tourist areas, and while I had been told to look out for bullet holes in the wall of Dubrovnik we could find none. 

We decided that Dubrovnik is a truly international city, by appearance not immediately recognisable as a Croatian city. It has a fascinating history that differs completely from most of Croatia. While many Croatian cities came under the control of Venice, Dubrovnik (which was then known as the Republic of Ragusa) was a serious rival of the Venetian empire and even had colonies in Africa and the "new world". Much of its glory was lost after a devastating earthquake in the 1600's and then the empire came to an end upon the arrival of Napoleon.

On our last day we took a boat cruise as we just had to see those walls from the sea. And so we took a glass bottom boat trip which lasted an hour, out of the harbour, past the walls and out and around the island of shore before coming back in again. It was a tiny old boat, and Rob and I sang the Gilligan's  Island theme song and the kids had no idea what had gotten into us.

And so a last memory of Dubrovnik would have to be the cats, they are everywhere, even jumping into my lap at lunch. But we were pretty sure that the cat on this menu didn't mean what we thought it meant. 

And so our Croatian adventure is over but we still have much more to go before we arrive home in mid January and so now we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and move on to the next big adventure..coming soon