It’s no wonder Dubrovnik is used as a backdrop for so many movies … its walls and streets are mostly intact; the walls are apparently the most complete after the great wall of China (I think it must be a far second but it’s pretty impressive nonetheless). We took almost two hours to take a leisurely walk around the walls. The guidebooks said to plan for an hour so I guess we were VERY leisurely. It was a gorgeous day so even just stopping to sit in the sun, get an ice cream, or generally hang out was a pleasure. And the views were amazing. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We started the day by taking the cable car up to Mt Srd, where we had a nice caffe latte and great views. Then we took the cable car back down (you can walk— it’s a lot of switchbacks and reportedly takes about 45 minutes down— but we only had one full day in Dubrovnik and thought we needed the time to check out the city). We did the walls next. Really cool.

Yes, I was obsessed with the little “huts” or sentry lookout towers. I took a lot of photos from those huts. Through their little windows. The castle had some arrow slits but mostly windows — some so large you could crawl through them. Not sure if that was to allow a controlled set of people in/out or (my favorite, but I’ve seen too many old movies) to allow for pouring hot oil or boiling water on invading enemies who are trying to crawl up the walls. Apparently the walls were fortified repeatedly since the 9th century and there are many layers of walls within walls as well as the obvious remains of a moat and drawbridges at the three main gates. There are also forts in strategic places along the walls and a large separate fort across a small channel. (Fort Lawrence in English but Lovrijenac in Croatian.) BTW, GoT fans, this fort was used by Tyrian for some attack … it was the Red Keep. Ummm, we obviously did not do the GoT tour though we did see a lot of the places where it’s been filmed. Anyway the forts were cool. Not hard to believe but there are stores that feature GoT and Star Wars paraphernalia because both were shot here recently. In fact our Uber driver was an extra in three GoT episodes and his son made it into Star Wars. Pretty funny.

Shockingly, we missed Cersei’s walk of shame stairs and Little Finger’s whore house on our one big day but saw them this morning. The stairs look to me like a mini Spanish Steps. Speaking of steps — a word on the Airbnb where we stayed. It was fabulous. With amazing views overlooking the city and water. We were above the cable car. But it’s 272 stairs from the main gates (either Ploce or Pile). So it wasn’t a casual thing to run into town if we forgot milk, for example. Once we were back in the place, we did not go out again!! It was totally worth the views but if we’d stayed there a week it might have gotten exhausting. Though there are plenty of houses up there so people clearly get used to it. And we literally picked mandarin oranges off the trees in front of our patio for a snack. Overall we all thought Dubrovnik was prettier than Split — the white limestone streets and walls were amazingly intact and impressive. But other than during the civil war in the 1990s, Dubrovnik hasn’t been attacked as much as the other cities I visited in Croatia. Clearly there’s still much bitterness toward the Serbs about the bombings — there’s at least one museum about it and the captain of the small boat we took mentioned it (with attitude). It feels very medieval. Some of the other cities were more Romanesque but the fact that these buildings looked pretty much how they did in the 1500s and beyond is quite cool.

So speaking of the boat, we wanted to catch a panoramic ride around Dubrovnik and a neighboring island, Lokrum (which was also used in GoT for when Danaerys visits the undead), which is an uninhabited island that has an old Franciscan monastery and lots of flora and fauna. We were glad take a boat ride but sadly it wasn’t quite timed right to be out on the water at sunset — it just missed. We were a tad annoyed (we asked for a sunset cruise) — Dubrovnik mostly faces south so you have to be high up or away from the rock outcroppings to catch good sunsets. Anyway life could be worse. We still got this. And that’s pretty much it for Dubrovnik. The weather was absolutely perfect — sunny and 70 with almost no wind or haze. We had to pack a lot into one full day along with an evening and a morning of two other days but managed to get it in. It actually rained on both the partial days we were there but it wasn’t pouring — and it didn’t interfere with our general plans. Final shots … I’m not sure which was my favorite Croatian town. They were all beautiful and mostly well preserved. Split was definitely the cheapest, Dubrovnik the easiest for touring (stuff was less closed down than in the other places as we were further south), Zadar the hippest and a Rovinj the most relaxing. In my humble opinion. I had the worst weather by far in Zadar which literally put a damper on activities there … I’d go back to any of them though for different reasons. I/We obviously didn’t go to many of the islands along the coast and I think my dream return trip would involve a nice yacht and floating around to different islands for a month. Ah well. Another time!

We spent a lot of time in airports on Wednesday. First the shuttle buses to the airport weren’t timed well for us. Now that we’ve seen how small and uncrowded the airport is, we clearly could’ve taken the later shuttle bus (it would have had us to the airport 1.25 hours early when the suggested time is two hours), but instead we took the next earlier one that got us there 3.5 hours early. Because we listened to our host and the agent at the shuttle bus company. Oh well. I’m sure they’d rather have us there early than complain if we missed our flight. Then we had a 3.5 hour layover in Madrid.

The good thing is that Elaine and Stephanie both have the fancy Chase Sapphire card, which gives them (and a mooching guest 😊) access to priority airport lounges. Woo hoo. Free booze. Free snacks. Free WiFi. What more could we ask for? Obviously I’m not used to such highfalutin treatment. It made the time pass much quicker! We also managed to use up our last kunas on chocolate and liqueur at the duty free shop in Dubrovnik. So nothing wasted.

We made it to Portugal and our Airbnb around midnight local time. FYI, with this time change and the US falling back with daylight savings time, I’m back to being 6 hours off from Chicago time. And I should remain in this time zone for awhile. That’s it for the night! Lisbon tomorrow!!