You've got be kidding! Rain again? I was trying to rescue my self-pride as a tourist by going for a brisk morning walk to the lakeshore, but not under torrential rain. Rats!
So once again I waited, drank coffee, read, and basically drove myself crazy waiting for noon, when I had to walk about half a mile to the place where I was to catch the bus to Dubrovnik. Fortunately the rain eased around noon, and my walk to the Rozafa Hotel was mostly dry. Once I got there a friendly rep of the bus company checked my online ticket and told the assembled audience that the bus was coming from a town in the mountains of Eastern Albania and was a bit delayed. Instead of 1:20 pm we left at 2:30 pm, which means that instead of getting to Dubrovnik at 8:30 pm I was going to get there at 9:30 pm, and in turn get to my B&B between 10 and 10:30 pm :(
It was a good bus ride, going around Shkodër Lake through Montenegro, a small nation of which I knew absolutely nothing. Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina were at some point in time grouped as Yugoslavia, which if memory serves me right was a communist country. Yugoslavia fell apart in the late 1980's, and the 1990's were marked by infighting between the different countries. Croatia and Slovenia became members of the European Union (which likely allowed them to an amazing economic reconstruction), and by some miracle Albania managed to be both a poor country and a rapidly developing country. I expected Montenegro to be similar to Albania, but from what I could see in a drive-by it is doing quite well, with a lively tourist industry (then again, Bob has just pointed out to me that when Voyager passed by Neptune 50 years ago the images showed it to be a pretty hue of blue, but apparently that was an artifact of the way the images were processed).
Eventually we made it to Croatia, and I found it to have a mountainous coast, with small towns hanging from the steep slopes (not as luminous as the towns in Montenegro). To my dismay, my EU SIM card was not working. Great, now I need to navigate an unknown city, at 10 pm, and without the help of Google maps. Fortunately I had a map, and I can still read maps, so half an hour later I had found the very dark ally that my B&B was located at. Mind you, this is a steep city with endless flights of stairs, so it was quite a feat to have found my way there. My host doesn't speak a lick of English, but he is a big happy man, and he knew he had a guest coming, so five minutes later I was comfortably installed in my comfortable room in a shared apartment with kitchen. Perfect!
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