Stairmastered

This trip has been a mixture of work, culture and vacation. Croatia was all vacation. Kevin and I spent one night in Split and four nights on the island of Hvar. There aren’t really beaches, but that doesn’t stop anybody. You just lay out your blanket on rocks and spend most of your time in the water. We spent most of our time wandering around in the sun and entertained ourselves looking for clouds (of which there are few in Croatia). Two nights in a row we saw spectacular sunsets from the rocky shore, and we got to jump off the white rocks into the ocean. Kevin got a little sunburned, but other than that it was absolutely beautiful.

You would think Kevin and I would be expert travelers after a whole summer and that our last stop, Dubrovnik, Croatia, would be a breeze. Except that there are no breezes in Croatia. It’s wonderfully, beautifully, oppressively hot there all the time.

Our hostel was right near the bus station, which would have been great except that a nice Croatian man picked us up at the bus station and drove us ten minutes in the wrong direction, so we had to walk across town to get there anyway. Let me explain. We got off the bus to see a friendly looking man holding a sign that said, “Kevin Kiley.” When he saw us eyeing him he thanked us for booking at his boarding house, helped us load our bags into the car, and brought us there. It turns out that this man was actually the owner of a hostel we had booked but then canceled around a month ago, and from some sort of miscommunication between Hostelworld.com, him, and us, he hadn’t heard about the change of plans. So we apologized, ate some pizza at a nearby restaurant, loaded our backpacks on our backs, and followed the directions for our actual hostel across town to “Kunska.” On the map, Kunska looks like a street. In person, it looks more like a staircase. By the time we had made it up the 329 individual stairs (to put this into perspective, your average staircase has around 12) we both just collapsed on the beds and fell asleep for two hours.

The next couple of days were pretty care-free, but not stair free. The old town in Dubrovnik is one of the only walled cities which still has its entire wall, and the coolest/only touristy thing to do there is walk around the city on the wall, so we did, and it was pretty cool. We spent the rest of the day eating, swimming, and looking for clouds (still none).

The next day we decided that the stairs to our hostel just weren’t enough for us, so we hiked up the hill outside the city to get some good pictures of it from the top. For the first time in Croatia, there were clouds! I think I counted three. But for the few blissful minutes that they covered the sun I wanted to run up the hill, embrace the clouds, and hug the water out of them. The pictures were magnificent. So were the drinks and ice cream we bought when we reached the bottom again.

We left early the next day for the trek to Frankfurt and its airport.