9/27 Day 1 Montenegro

After the trek last night no one is up at the crack of dawn. The bells on the churches rang for 10 minutes at 7:00am so that must mean it's time to rise and shine. We putz around and have to wait for "She With The Name None Of Us Can Pronounce" to bring our passports back and give us some more instructions. Plus, more on this later, we had to change our plane tickets from here to Budapest and wanted her to hire a car on the 3rd to take us back to Dubrovnik airport. Decide to explore Old Town Kotor today and so we take our respective turns getting gussied up.

Call for a taxi and take the 5 minute ride into old town. It is a walled city in nice condition and not nearly as crowded as Dubrovnik. This makes it almost tolerable and pleasant. First chore is grub. We choose a restaurant right on the square and the ladies have spaghetti with whole clams andI have a stuffed pork. Mine is OK, a little too dry for my taste, but has a nice flavor with, of course paprika on the potatoes and meat.

Inside the walls of the old city there is church after church mostly Orthodox. They are somewhat more elaborate than the ones in Croatia but, again, not yet up to Spain. There is also an old "bazar" that used to serve as a troop barracks selling all types of goods. Shirley buys a couple of Christmas ornaments and Carroll buys some stuff for her ladies group.

There are cats all over the place and I guess, at least according to the locals, they are the symbol of Kotor. Who we arrived at our flat this afternoon there were five on the neighbors back doorstep. They seem to be well behaved and liked by the locals but a cat is a cat.

We exit the city and walk down to Lida, the local grocery store, and get some stuff that was missing at the flat such as laundry detergent,

instant coffee and some stuff we want for snacks tonight ham, cheese, olives and bread.

We got to checking our tickets for our flight in to Budapest next week and for some strange reason the travel agents routed us through Split which is a 6 hour bus ride from Kotor , our present location. That doesn't include the border crossing. We call the dumb so and so agent and they now have us leaving from Dubrovnik which hopefully will only take us a couple of hours to get to from here. Of course we had to pay extra.

Overall a good day.Tomorrow we go to Budva which is about a 45

minute BUS ride. Another adventure awaits. I am also just going to post some pics of Kotor because it is pretty cool.

Pleasant night and overall a good day. The essence of Montenegro is more Russian...it has a different feel and pulse; not being off putting but just not the same.

Light day...3 floors, 1.3 miles and 3602 steps.

I am going to take break here and just post a couple of pages of pics.