Dubrovnik

So once again apologies for the long delay between posts. Hopefully that will be better now that we are not traveling so quickly. We have so many pictures to go through that I will have to spend some time on the laptop sorting and organizing, rather than trying to do it here in the internet cafe where I pay by the minute.

However, here are at least a couple. Here we are in Ljubljana on the day we met up with my parents. We are standing at the end of the Dragon Bridge.

A few days later, here are my parents and Claire up at the top of the castle in Bled, with some of the lake in the background.

Now, Claire and I (and my parents) are in Dubrovnik, where it is raining for the first time here in 4 months. The hillsides are scarred with black marks from the fires they have been having. So we are taking the day to get caught up on trip planning and email, and updating this blog.

Since my last post when we were heading off to Zagreb, we've been through Zagreb (but didn't stay there) and then drove to Plitviče National Park. It's hard to describe it... a lot of small lakes connected by lots of waterfalls. That doesn't sound like much, but it is really amazing. Since the water is so loaded with calcium carbonate, the chemistry and physics of the water results in waterfalls which instead of carving deep channels and becoming a single channel, the waterfalls spread out and becomes wide collections of many waterfalls, running all over the landscape.

After Plitviče, we drove to Split (yes, that is the name of the city) and left the car, with a couple of nights there, followed by one night on the island of Hvar. We could have spent a lot longer on Hvar but had to leave the next day because that is when the twice weekly ferry runs. However in the short time there we managed to see the sights, have a good seafood meal, go swimming in the Adriatic, and catch a wonderful choir concert at the former Franciscan monestary that night.

And now we are in Dubrovnik. Sunday afternoon we will be taking the ferry back to Italy, landing in Bari. From there we head over towards Naples and the Almafi coast, Vesuvius and Pompeii, and then south towards Sicily.