Yesterday morning, we hiked to the public car park to retrieve the rental car and headed out of town again, and again north, though not crossing any borders this time. We veered to the left instead, crossing over to the Peljesac Peninsula, known as good grape-growing territory. First we stopped in Ston for Rebecca to search in vain for coffee in a to-go cup, and for Jen to get throat lozenges (not in vain. Jen ate them like candy the rest of the day.) We snapped a few photos of the great wall of Ston surrounding the old town but we were too early in the week for the Ston Wall Marathon that will be held there this coming weekend. Sounds fun?
Second longest wall in the world, after China's.
We drove the rest of the way to Orebic to catch our ferry to Korcula in a rainstorm, on twisty turny roads, sometimes behind slow-moving garbage trucks. We feared that it might interfere with our plans for the day, but luckily, the skies had cleared by the time we parked the car and boarded the ferry for our 15 minute ride to the island.
Town of Korcula. It has a wall around it too, but nothing compared to Ston's wall.
After a not-so-quick lunch (it’s Europe, after all), we set out to explore the Old Town of Korcula. We stopped by the City Museum for a history lesson. In its long history, Korcula has been invaded by several different armies: the Venetians, Ottomans, and Hapsburgs (and probably more that I can’t remember). Because Rebecca likes to climb high things and she knows that it freaks Jen out, we had to venture up to the top of the church tower. Admittedly, the views were impressive. And, it gave Jen a chance to find the Marco Polo house, technically the house that was rebuilt on the site where he was presumably born.
Jen, very excited to see the house where the house Marco Polo lived may have once stood.
And there wasn’t much to see at the “Marco Polo House” so we ventured out of the city walls to find a swimming spot. This time we found a small pebbly beach—pretty much any small patch of land next to the water seems to quality as a beach in this country—and took a dip. On our walk back to catch the ferry, we had our daily dose of ice cream.
Why yes, ice cream IS delicious.
Sadly, we didn’t plan well with the ferry schedule. We assumed it was hourly, but it wasn’t. So with an hour to kill, we got Jen an alcoholic beverage and Rebecca her long-awaited coffee for the day (though Rebecca may have dozed off waiting for it to be served.) The drive back through the peninsula went a lot more quickly than the rainy drive there, which was good because we hoped to find a few wineries to stop at for tastings. Our first stop was unsuccessful, but happily we found two willing to give us tastes a little further along. We like the posip white the best!
Jen, sad that this winery was closed.
Posip tasting victory!
We were happy to find a bottle of posip to go with our pasta dinners back in Dubrovnik. We wandered through town a bit more and managed to find parts of the small old town that we hadn’t stumbled across yet. And because we could, we had second ice cream cones for the day.
Yes, we're on vacation, and are therefore being a bit gluttonous.
An overnight thunderstorm woke us up with booming thunder right over our heads, and that storm seems to be returning this morning. Gr! Time to figure out if we’ll be able to get on kayaks or if we’ll have to find something else to do with our day. Rebecca still hasn’t dragged Jen up the cable car, so there’s that!
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