Our Final Day

Well today was our last day and we didn’t have an itinerary planned. There were plenty of options, but we settled on a boat ride and biking, of all things. I guess we didn’t get enough of that in Montenegro. We walked the 3+ miles round trip down to the harbor to see if we could hop a ferry to one of the many islands off shore. Unfortunately we found out that we missed the ferry and the next one was to leave in the afternoon. We still wanted to go so we walked back to the hotel, lounged by the beach for a couple of hours, and then made the 45 minute trek back down to the harbor. I guess the 6 miles of walking wasn’t enough exercise for us because when we arrived to the island of Lopud, the first thing we did was seek out bike rentals. We found some cute mountain bikes and I was thrilled. I thought we would take a nice leisurely ride for an hour. Wrong. It started out nice enough. I think I was smiling in some of these pictures.

But our hour quickly turned into 2 hours and our leisurely ride quickly turned into serious technical and steep mountain biking. It was a windy day and I was dressed really warm due to the fact that the boat ride was chilly. So here I am on our last leisurely day of vacation, sweating, panting, huffing and puffing, and pushing this stupid bike up a mountain for no good reason. uuugh. How did this happen? After another mile or so I protested and demanded we ride back down to the shore. Well the ride down was much worse because we weren’t dressed properly - no bike shorts and worse, no helmet. Remember the windy day? Well the wind was blowing from my left which is not ideal for my hair. My long bangs were completely covering my eyes and face as I’m trying to negotiate this rocky technical trail. Get me to pavement and I’ll be happy.

Well, I spoke to soon. We got to pavement all right, but then what do you think happened? We decided to bike to this lovely sandy beach. Doesn’t that sound nice?

What I didn’t know was that it was on the other side of the island and do you remember my description of Croatian islands? They are all just tips of much larger mountains that just happen to be poking out of the water. So we went from sea level up and over to the other side. Once again, huffing puffing, sweating and maybe a little cursing. And to think I was so missing the biking. uuuugh. We found the beach, we waddled and breathed a sigh of relief.

Then we had to huff it back up and over to get back to the ferry landing. I was pooped. Good news was that I slept very good. Right up until 4 am when it was time to head to the airport for our 25.5 hours of traveling to get home.

And that completes my very long winded recap of our entire vacation. If you've been following along, thanks for sharing our journey with us. To see the complete sets of pictures (OK, not really the complete sets, but lots more) please follow these links: Montenegro Highlights & Dubrovnik Highlights. Or to watch all the pictures in movie form, click here for Montenegro and here for Dubrovnik.

Normal blogging will begin tomorrow . . .