Dubrovnik, Croatia

The next stop on our trip is to Dubrovnik, Croatia, "the pearl of the Adriatic." Dubrovnik is a beautiful city along Dalmatia, Croatia's Adriatic Sea coast, with its narrow streets, thousands of stairs, pebble beaches, stray cats, city walls, island excursions and plenty of fine dining. We rented an apartment, known as "Apartment Niksa," where we had to climb 5000 stairs to get to our room from the main street.

When we got to our apartment, we were greeted by a barking guard dog I liked to refer to as Scruffy Pants, or Mr. McScruff. By the end of our stay, Scruffy had become our friend by greeting us without barking (this is not to say that we didn't still think McScruff wanted to chew our leg off every time we walked by), giving us so much as a limp wag of the tail and also guarding our difficult-to-maneuver parking spot.

Anyone who visits Dubrovnik visits Old Town, with its magnificent curtain of walls surrounding marble streets and baroque buildings. Inside the city walls you can't help but stroll down the main pedestrian thoroughfare, Placa, while eating several gellato ice cream cones during the day to cool down in the blaring Adriatic sun. Placa is a melange of cafes and shops with monuments, churches, museums with carved walls and fountains. There are several narrow "streets" filled with cafes and shops branching off Placa where we found plenty of outstanding Croatian cuisine.

We took a day trip to the island on Lopud, one of the few places around Dubrovnik with sandy beaches. We camped out on a small beach on the island. It was not until after we had been there all day that we saw a sign for Sinj Beach, which required hiking through Lopud's backcountry to the other side of the island (which felt like hell on what could have been THE hottest, most humid day in Croatian history). We were a little bummed that the lady who sold us the boat tickets didn't bother to mention this was the cool beach. Too bad for us, we missed out on all those Euro-style sunbathing beauties (wink, wink).

On this same HOT day, we decided to hike around the city walls to get a birds eye view of the Old Town.

While the views were awesome and the photo ops abundant, I thought I was going to die from the heat. I have never sweat so much as I did this day. I think I have permanently damaged the white shirt with sweat stains.

We decided we would take a day trip to Split, to visit the ancient walls of Diocletian's (a Roman Emperor)Palace, dating back to as early as 400 A.D. Our travel book said it would take about 4 1/2 hours to get to Split by bus, so being the speedy drivers we are, we figured we could get there in 2-3 hours. HA!! It took nearly 4 hours to get to Split. Would I say Diocletian was worth it? I don't know. It was a long day.

This is the statue of Gregorius of Nin, a 10th-century Slavic religious leader who fought for the right to perform Mass in Croatian. It's said that touching his big toe brings good luck. I'm buyin' it.