Cruise Blogging: Kotor, Montenegro

Thursday was another new country: Montenegro! Who's ever even heard of Montenegro before? It's squeezed in there, right between Albania and Serbia. It was shockingly beautiful. I thought after Dubrovnik that I wouldn't be surprised any more, but I was.

To get to Kotor, the boat had to navigate through what looked like a fjord. Apparently it technically isn't a fjord, but ria, a submerged river canyon, according to wikipedia. So there you go, learn something new every day. Ria, that's a good words4friends word for you Nick. Bust that one out on Tom!

Here, I'll let some of my pictures do the talking:

I wish I could have gotten a picture that captured what a tight fit it felt like for the boat! Standing in the middle of the upper deck and looking out, you'd think we were land-locked. More impressive than sailing in, however, was the fact that the captain sailed back out in the dark!

The town of Kotor was very small but very beautiful. It kind of looked like a smaller Dubrovnik, with the same white stone everywhere and beautifully paved streets. It was a little dirtier and seedier, though, with a serious stray cat problem.

Girls in front of a palace

See, slightly seedy

Nick and the girls looking pretty.

The real highlight of Kotor was hiking up the walls built by the Venetians to protect the city a very long time ago. I don't know when, exactly, wikipedia is letting me down here.

But wow, what a hike. And what a view from up there!

After a while, mom and the girls and I turned back. Nina could easily have made it up the rest of the way, she kept running ahead and hopping up and down while she waited for the rest of us to catch up, but she was getting bored with it. Maggie wanted to be carried most of the time, and I was getting pretty tired of that, and Mom was getting tired and a bit dizzy from looking straight down. So just Nick and dad reached the old fort, but we saw their pictures from up there, good enough. See:

It was a good thing we turned back when we did anyway, because I had to carry Maggie most of the way down too, and that was harder than I thought it was going to be. She's getting heavy! I also had to reign Nina in and keep her from beating the rest of us down by half an hour.

After that we had some juice, wine, and beers at a cafe in town, then headed back to the comfort of the boat.

Nick took a few more pictures before joining us on the boat, like this one of a church:

And this one of the wall lit up in the dark. This doesn't really capture it's height; it reaches nearly 1,000 feet above the city, but I think the photos from the top convey how high up you get.

What an experience that was!