Saturday, 15 August. As we cranked our way up the cardiac hill leading from Cavtat to Highway 8, I saw the sun shining like a halo around the 1400-m peaks beyond the Dubrovnik Airport. We rode a ridge road on the western edge of a broad plateau at about 200 meters. No wonder that the airport occupied the plateau: it had to be the only piece of flat real estate in the whole country big enough for an airport. As it is, someone had chopped off a small hilltop to complete the site work. Continue reading →

Thursday, 13 August (53.3 km). We took an early ferry from Korčula to Orebic. As we debarked, a carload of Polish tourists dickered with the crew of a fishing vessel trying to offload their catch into a waiting truck. I remember buying fish that fresh when we lived in Gaeta.  Continue reading →

Tuesday, 4 August, 2015. (53.2 km) In the morning, we rode down to the ferry port and confirmed what we learned in Dubrovnik. The former Yugoslav national ferry line, now called Jadrolinja, simply will not take bicycles on its high-speed ferries. Continue reading →

Friday, 31 July. The granite mountains towered over Dubrovnik as the ferry entered the bay. I tried to pick out the hotel where I stayed when the USS Springfield called in 1972, the first American warship to visit Yugoslavia in many years. New highways snaked through the hills, and new suburbs spread north and south of the city, making it hard to figure out where things used to be. Continue reading →