Dubrovnik and Kotor

October 11, 2025

Hello again! European cruises are an endurance event. For us and for you, dear reader.

Dubrovnik was an absolute treat! We had a transfer into town instead of a guided tour. The Old Town in Dubrovnik is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The first thing we did was ascend the wall. The fortified wall surrounds the Old Town and is about 1.3 miles around and is walked counter-clockwise. There are about 1080 steps of various depth, height and width. It took us about 1.5 hours to make it all the way around. We took many stops for pictures.

Onofrio's fountain was built in 1440 is tied into the city aqua duct system and continues to bring fresh water to the city. It has sixteen sides with a lion on each side with a spout. We refilled our water bottle here.

Of course after walking the wall we had to explore the Old Town.

Fransician Monestary

Another church

The narrow streets were charming!

St. Mary cathedral

Lunch break. A delicious cheese plate and a Greek Salad. Awesome!

This art work is one of a series in one of the cathedrals we visited. It was just beautiful.

Final activity of the day was a cable car ride up he mountain. We had to climb a lot of stairs to get to the station but the view was worth the effort.

The view.

It was a 15,000 step day and many of those steps were stairs. Dubrovnik is a must-see!

Today (Saturday) we are in Kotor, Montenegro. Our planned excursion is kayaking! How exciting!

As with many of our kayak stories, this one did not go quite according to plan. Our ship is "parked" quite a distance from the port of Kotor so we start our day early to take a tender to the port. This 45 minute ride gets 22 of us to our guide. We have to walk to the beach where the kayaks are, this is about 15 minutes walk. Kotor is also a UNESCO site as well as the Bay of Kotor is a protected natural area.

This view is from the cruise ship.

If you zoom way in you might be able to see a cruise ship parked in the distance - I guess they got here first.

We started of cleanly into the Bay fighting the wind. There were whitecaps on the surface, the waves were 4-5 feet and the wind was blowing like crazy.

After about 25 minutes we saw a small boat approach our guide. They had a conversation and then we were told to gather and wait for the other kayakers.

Turns out this other boat was a local fisherman who came to ask our guide why in the world he thought kayaking was a good idea today!!!!

Having only gone about 1/3 of the way to our destination we were given the choice of going back or continuing. Carsten and I, along with four other kayaks decided to go back.

By the time we were back the other group had turned around as well. It was just not the day for this adventure!

We did get wet so we call that a successful day!