You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Seth and I made a promise to one another at the beginning to have an adventure and travel with a loose itinerary so that we could have adventures. As I am writing this I am sitting on the balcony from our Villa in Croatia with the stars above me, their reflection dancing on the Adriatic while the gentle waves lap against the rocks beneath us. Not only is our living accomodation an unreal spectacle, perhaps the most satisfying aspect is that we have five other people from three different countries living here. We batted around the idea of whether this villa would be too much, or if these people that we have known for mere hours would come through so that we were not stuck with the bill on our own, and we ended up going with our gut and pulling the trigger.

Seth is pointing where our villa is. It's awesome.

It turns out that this was one of the best decisions we could have made. Seth and I love history, and we both love to see new things, but we were both a bit tired of museums, monuments, and important stuff. Not that those things are not cool, but we are on vacation and many of those things take coordination, planning, and walking, which can get a bit tiresome. Today we made the 10 minute walk from our villa down to the Old Town to check out the center, then mosied back up to the villa and hopped in the Adriatic for a swim. I still can not believe how we got here, how amazing this place is, and that we are sharing it with 5 complete strangers.

We have not completely abanoned our touristic intentions, though. Our good friend Rick Steve's (Seth's noble travel companion, well, actually Rick Steve's writes travel books and we have his Eastern Europe volume) gave us a brief history of Dubruvnik and it is quite interesting. Dubruvnik was attacked by the Serbian military in 1991. Not even twenty years ago! The town we are staying in was shelled by Serbs and the Croatians living in Dubruvnik took antique muskets and whatever weapons they could find and held off the Serbian National Army for nearly thrity days until the Croatian Army came and was able to push back the Serbs. Interestingly, the medieval walls built up around the old town area of Dubruvnik were used for there first time in battle during this conflict. It is crazy to think that that was so recent. I am not sure how staying in awesom villa with random awesome people in an awesome place relates to a recent war, but, hey, you can't make this shit up.