After braving the suicidal traffic on the bridges out of Trogir (I advised Lidia to close her eyes and hope for the best, because that is what I was doing), we started down the coast to Dubrovnik.

This is a slow drive, much of it along the winding coastal roads where drivers feel they must do less than 50 the whole way. Add to this the fact that there are 2 border crossings 2 kms apart, where Bosnia owns a 2 km stretch of land, and you have quite a long drive.

We left nice and early, expecting this and made it to Dubrovnik just after lunch. We checked into our hotel, which is a beautiful boutique hotel a short bus ride away from the old town. We were extremely happy for the pool, which we used quite a bit over the 3 days given the weather was mid to high 30's the entire time (even at night).

After a nice lunch near the hotel, we took the bus into the old town. Wow, what a magnificent place. A small, walled fortress town, packed with tiny alleyways, restaurants, shops and, most importantly, the best ice cream shop ever! We found Dolce Vita tucked away in one of the alleyways and they sure got a fair bit of business out of us during our stay. The ice cream was superb.

On the first night, we took the cable car up to a lookout just before sunset and took some amazing photos of the old town and the sun setting over the islands just off the coast.

The next day we had 2 walking tours in the old town. The first started at 10:00 for 2.5 hours around the streets of old town, giving us a lot of history of the city right back to the medieval times when they were a trading colony competing with Venice for world trade. The tour guide also covered a lot of history on the 1992 war with Serbia and showed us all of the damage done to the city, which was significant.

It was interesting that a lot of the city was actually built by the Venetians, Italians, Austrians and France (through Napoleon) during different periods of occupation through the centuries.

After a lunch of cevap and grilled vegies, we had yet more ice cream, then back to the hotel for a swim before our afternoon tour, which started at 5:30 and took us around the walls of the city. The wall walk was fantastic with amazing views across the old town and the ocean.

After the tour finished we went to Moby Dick's for dinner, which is a restaurant recommended to us by Dennis and Linda and where Dennis proposed. The owner, Nick, has family in Geelong and we introduced ourselves to him. He was very friendly and shouted us a round of drinks and dessert. We were so full after our seafood platter that we really wanted to skip dessert (and another huge beer), but we had to force it down so as not to offend Nick. We couldn't even fit in an ice cream after dinner!

We spent the next day walking around the beaches outside the old town and had a XXL cocktail each, which basically was a 1 litre cocktail. Lidia couldn't finish hers, so I kinda rolled out of the streetside bar.

After that we went back to the hotel for another swim in the pool. I tried to do a professional, Olympic level dive into the pool, and unfortunately misjudged and did a belly-whacker. This caused the pool to overflow and a tidal wave hit the bag of an English couple. Oops. Just as we were about to leave, it turns out that Lidia's shorts were on the ground and also fell victim to my tidal wave. I wasn't a popular boy. Olympic diving career: over.

For dinner we went to a place called Peppers right near our hotel and the meal was really good. Peppers is a small family run business who obviously take great pride in providing their guests with delicious quality meals. We ordered sharing plates of dips and breads, fish cakes, chicken skewers & the most succulent bbq pork belly all accompanied by a delightful COLD local white wine. What a wonderful way to spend our last night in Croatia.