An early start again to get the last bit of sightseeing in Old Town Korčula done before the ferry. We started again with coffee & juice on the terrace, then ate fruit and yogurt while watching the morning boats.
The host greeted us again this morning, this time bringing fresh filled croissants that her friend made - really generous.
We finished packing and had to run to town quickly to get more cash for the apartment payment. Throughout the Dalmatians it has largely been cash for everything - lodging, car rental and meals.
After paying and giving the keys back, she also offered us some figs from her tree and gave us this:
Here is the water in front of the house and our rental car.
We nearly made out to Old Town Korčula to return the car before remembering that we needed to fill it with diesel...backtracking past the apartment we got the car refilled and hurried back to the meeting point. No issues in returning the car, so we put on our packs and walked through the Old Town for 30 minutes before the ferry came.
The ferry was new so was very nice and had power outlets to charge with (yay) but no WiFi (boo). We stopped at the island of Mljet to drop off/pick up people then continued the ~two hour ride to Dubrovnik.
As always, there were taxis waiting at the port, but these drivers seemed particularly aggressive with each other, vying for fares with shouts and flaring tempers. One allegedly wronged driver even took the passenger’s bags out of another taxi to put in hers. When we got our taxi, he got into a shouting match with another driver and carelessly dropped our Turkish dish out of the car (fingers crossed that it was protected enough).
As we were staying near Old Town Dubrovnik, the taxi couldn’t drive right to the apartment so dropped us at the bottom of the hill below the address. We must have climbed 100 stairs to finally get to the location, then called the host and waited for nearly 45 minutes for them to come. Fortunately there was a patio and we’d brought food and drinks, and Don used the time to do some writing.
The host showed up and apologized for the confusion (apparently Hotels.com does not handle messages well), then got us right in to a beautiful apartment.
She went on to give us lots of sightseeing ideas, had stocked some basics in the refrigerator, put out some traditional Croatian brandies, ran to get us coffee pods and brought us a chilled bottle of rosé - people are nice. 👍
While we were talking with the host the Dubrovnik weather quickly turned mean...
The host left but the rain and lightning were violent for a couple hours, so we used the time to catch up having WiFi again. We were able to book another nights hotel stay and get the next car rental booked. We watched the lightning for quite a while, even seeing lightning strike a house in the village right in front of us (haven’t seen that before). The sun eventually came back out so we quickly went out to discover Old Town Dubrovnik and tried out one of the restaurants the host recommended - here are just a few of the initial pics...
The place that was recommended to us closed because of the weather (all outside dining), so we went in search of something else. A quick lesson that we got on Old Town Dubrovnik is that it was built on a steep hill, so walking one direction is always on steep stairs, while the other direction is generally flat. This narrowed our initial search to only a couple streets, but we quickly found a good looking place and ordered Osso Buco and Tuna Tartar - it was all delicious (albeit more expensive because of the location).
Following this nice meal we walked more of the city, getting an initial sense of its size and layout (it’s big!), taking more pics as went walked
Since we’d made our initial pass once through the city, we considered walking on top of the city walls (which will cost ~$30/ea and take a couple hours) but opted to go get groceries for the next couple days instead. We made a good choice since about five minutes before we got to the apartment, angry Dubrovnik weather came back and a downpour opened up for the next half an hour.
We settled into the room and read/watched more about Dubrovnik getting ready to have a full day in the city tomorrow.
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