We’re now on the ship and have visited our first 3 ports — Dubrovnik (Croatia), Kotor (Montenegro) and Korcula (Croatia) — though this entry will only cover Dubrovnik. The scenery on our bus ride from Rome to the port looks very much like Southern California — green and brown hills, palm trees, bougainvillea trees, cacti, century plants. There are more conifers here, the tree line seems quite low, and the hills are more khaki/tan than brown/orange.
At the port on Friday while boarding we saw two interesting ferry boats — one painted with Superman and the other with Wiley Coyote and friends.
It’s fun to see so many familiar faces — at least a dozen folks from the January cruise — and the group as a whole seems to have a great group of people, mostly Canadians, about a dozen Americans and two Aussies. We do seem to be one of the larger groups on board and we’re quite recognizable with our geocaching shirts, matching room key lanyards, and (at ports) a GPS in hand. Alas, we learned at our opening meeting that the Albania excursion was cancelled because the hydrofoil is broken. Bummer, but nothing we can do about it (and so much for my “who the Hell has been to Albania” line). The ship itself is almost identical to the one we were on in January, but there’s surprisingly little hand sanitizer around.
We had a nice sea day on Saturday, starting with waking up while passing Stromboli which is a volcano that excluded a wisp of smoke since it is erupting a bit. We got to go through the Strait of Messina which was impressively narrow (and involved a pilot boarding the ship to navigate). Jana and I also attended a few talks, toured the kitchen, etc. I learned that one can ask for sashimi which is available even though it is not obvious. Chris Edley’s photo talk was excellent — here are some of the gems, for future reference: fill the frame with what you like, know what you’re taking a picture of, don’t zoom digitally (optically is fine), “rule of thirds”, when posing keep arms away from body and fingers spread out / stand on back foot / goose neck, etc. And the most exciting part of Chris’ talk was learning that Albania is back on — for (only) our group — as alternate transportation had been arranged. I also booked the Panama Canal cruise for early 2021 and may already have a roommate.
Sunday we both wore our Portland Thorns gear — team scarfs and light sweatshirts (Jana also wore a Tobin Heath jersey) — in honor of the Thorns’ playoff match later that day (spoiler alert: they lost 1-0). It was warm enough that the scarfs and sweatshirts soon moved to our backpacks.
Our Old Town walking tour was pleasant and informative. Dubrovnik experienced a major earthquake in 1667, so many buildings showed evidence of repairs. A few centuries ago, a priest objected to children kicking soccer balls against the church walls so carved graffiti discouragingly that behavior....men’s soccer is a big deal there (2nd in World Cup 2016) but women’s not so much, and the major sport in Dubrovnik is water polo.
After the tour we wandered through Old Town, found a couple of caches, then went outside the wall for a traditional cache for which one had to descend a walkway that went through a cafe (it was delightful to hear Yellow Submarine as we walked through the cafe)....truth be told we didn’t exactly find the cache, we found fellow travelers who were signing the cache so we added our names then took pictures of the exquisite view of the Adriatic Sea.
After an unimpressive lunch we wandered to the local no-longer-in-use Synagogue where I wasted 50 kuna (about $8) to enter an orthodox no-pictures-allowed sanctuary, then ventured upstairs to the barren women’s section and bonked my head on a horizontal pipe while descending. I’m glad they’re preserving the history, just wish it wasn’t so painful (figuratively and literally).
We then decided to make our way up to the Cable Car to get a view of the city. En route we spied a children’s park and used the teeter totter (hence this entry’s title). We also followed a foursome who asked us to take their picture, then offered to take ours. I had a nice conversation with one of them, in French (he spoke slowly for me) and learned he’s retired and living in the South of France after living and working in Paris and that he’s recently visited New York and California.
By the time we reached the bottom of the cable car we’d ascended a couple dozen flights of stairs. We were lucky enough to be at the bottom cable car window for both rides so got some nice pictures. The top was nice and full of photo ops though unfortunately the cache that was there had been recently archived and was not findable. After descending we decided to walk the ~2.5 km back to the ship and find 3 caches en route. As we were putting the first cache away we were joined by 8 others from the group and found the other two together.
We got to see a show with some local (Dalmatian) dancers and singers, a fine end to a great day in Croatia!
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