Day 11: Slogging to Dubrovnik


Our flight to Dubrovnik was at 6 a.m. New Year's Day, and London was so loud with celebration that I didn't even try to sleep. From about 11 p.m. on it was all sirens and yelling in the streets! Which meant that of course our flight got delayed, and then rerouted to a different city with a connection, and then what should have been a three-hour journey took eleven hours. Such are the exhausting perils of travel. 

Luckily, our hotel was very close to the airport in Dubrovnik, so it took very little time to pick up the rental car and zip to the Sheraton. The Sheraton isn't actually in Dubrovnik--it's about 10 minutes outside of the Old Town--but it's peaceful and on the water. It's also spacious and new, which was a nice change after the shoebox London hotel.


We got upgraded to the corner executive suite with two balconies! Below is the living room, the view at sunset, and the bedroom.





Despite being zombie tired, we went into Dubrovnik to walk around for a short while. The colors as the sun set were pastel and beautiful, and there is a small Christmas market outside of the Pile Gate and down the main thoroughfare. One of the booths gave me a shot of something sweet and licoricey that I immediately regretted, considering I hadn't eaten since the day before. (It's feast or famine on a Lovett-Lucas vacation...there is no in between.)




Below is the Pile Gate, the main entrance to the city. And, also important, where a scene from Game of Thrones was shot (where the people riot against Joffrey, if we're being specific).


Inside the Pile Gate.


Pretty lights down the main road of Dubrovnik. Off to either side of the street are either steep alleys with more shops and restaurants, or narrow streets.



The very end of sunset in Dubrovnik.


My snack to hold me over until dinner...a cup of prikls, which are little fried balls of dough that you smother in cinnamon sugar and then stab with a wooden skewer to eat. 


Dinner is not pictured as my photos were terrible, but we ate at a cozy little spot called Ruzmarin and I had a burrata salad and mushroom ravioli. Then, to Taylor's dismay, I was fast asleep by 8 p.m. and stayed that way for the next 11 hours. 

Comments

  1. RachelJanuary 10, 2019 at 5:41 AM

    Sounds like a rough trip, but that's another great view from your hotel room!

    Feast or famine - that sounds like your vacations, all right!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Christmas Magic in London, Part One

Image
Since London is a huge and historic city with endless things to do, you can't visit without doing something new (even if you're staying for fewer than 48 hours). So first up on the agenda--the Dickens Museum! Dickens lived there for two years, from 1837 to 1839, and it's the only house in which he lived that's left standing. Also he wrote Oliver Twist there! And while Dickens isn't my personal top-tier Victorian author, I'm up for any literary site and especially any insight into Victorian times. In another life, I'm a Victorianist at an East Coast college, wearing wooly sweaters while I read in my toasty office. I don't know why so many of these are sideways...just tilt your head. Anyway, on the lower level you can wander through the kitchen and Dickens' wine cellar, where I learned that Victorian families kept pet hedgehogs to eat bugs. Elowen enjoyed drawing "Bill Spikes" (puns!) while I looked around. On the next floor, Elowen charged ...
Read more

Otherworldly Magic in the Puzzlewood and a Visit to Hereford

Image
Our second full day in the Cotswolds was supposed to be rainy and also it was a bank holiday, so we didn't think we'd be able to find parking or enjoy the little towns we had slated for the day. Instead, we decided to drive to Puzzlewood (which was actually very close to our hotel in Wales) and then visit the Cider Museum in Hereford, both things I'd really wanted to do and was feeling angsty about missing.      Puzzlewood is an ancient woodland (dating back at least 10,000 years) in the Forest of Dean, in Gloucestershire England. A local landowner laid down a mile of windy, maze-like pathways in the 1800s for his children, friends, and neighbors, and it later opened as a tourist attraction in the 1900s.  I wanted to make sure we had it mostly to ourselves, so we were there and in line at the ticket office before the gates even opened--then we dashed in!       It's even more glowy-green and otherworldly than it looks in the pictures, and it truly feels...
Read more

Mdina, the Silent City

Another highlight of Malta (perhaps more legitimate than Popeye's Village) was Mdina, known as the silent city both because no cars are allowed other than those of residents and also because it has only a few hundred residents.  The city gate I'm sure in summer it's pretty packed, but we had the city largely to ourselves...just a few other tourists and some horse and carriages. And it's truly lovely...the streets shine, smoothed by hundreds of years of feet walking through history before you, and there are so many narrow, winding alleys in which to get lost.  It's been inhabited since prehistory, with a Phoenician settlement in 8 BC. Then the Romans captured it and it kept passing hands through the centuries until the Order of St. John (a Catholic military order) took the city over in 1530. It later belonged to the French and then of course the British got it back, and then MUCH more recently it was used as a filming location for King's Landing in the first seas...
Read more