Before I start my post, I have a question. Who the heck are all of you people? I just glanced at my site stats, and I had 185 page views yesterday. Now I know that in the grand scheme of blogs and things, that that’s not a huge amount, but considering my average page view count hovers around 40-50 on a good day, that’s quite a bit of a jump. So feel free to leave a comment and say hi! :-)
Anyway. Like the post title says, today was slow. John was feeling a bit under the weather today, so we took our time getting out the door. We headed into Budva (short but traffic-y bus ride away) and wandered around the old town for a while.
The old city of Budva, looking from the Citadel/city wall.
.
While in the old city, we went to the archaeological museum, which was really more like the archaeological four smallish rooms. They did have some neat old stuff though. I think the thing I found most interesting, though, wasn’t an artifact per se… well, it was, but it wasn’t really archaeological, and it was more the little narrative blurb that went along with it that I found absolutely fascinating. I’ll link to the Wikipedia article to explain more clearly, but basically way back in the day before sailors had a more modern way to measure their speed, they used something called a chip log/ship log, which is what the museum had on display. It was a wooden board, tied to a rope that had knots tied at intervals of 47 feet, 3 inches. A sailor tossed the log over and paid out the rope, and used a 28-second hourglass to time it. 47 feet and 3 inches, and 28 seconds… I read this on the information blurb at the museum and immediately decided it had to be a Brit who invented it. Lo and behold, the very next sentence indicated that the inventor of this system was English. Color me surprised. Yaay for the English system being non-metric and really confusing! Anyway, however many knots were paid out in those 28 seconds was how fast the ship was going — how many knots! SO INTERESTING. I know, I’m a huge nerd.
Around mid-afternoon, we headed back to relax and do some planning for the next couple of days. We also had a late lunch.
This is the stationary version of a pretty typical travel lunch. We've got whatever bread the local store/bakery had (one hunk of bread for each of us) topped with cheese (in this case, a soft cheese) and balsamic vinegar. Then we have our fruit (well, in this case it's tomatoes, but it's either dried apricots from our stash or fresh fruit if we happen to pick some up.) This was it for today, but often it'll include granola bars or trail mix from the stash, and sometimes chocolate for dessert. Good stuff. :-)
.
After hanging out for a bit, we went on a walk to the next beach over, then we hung out and chatted with our host for a bit, then we spent some time figuring out travel plans for our next few cities — Mostar (1 night), Sarajevo (3 nights), Baja Luka (1 night) and Zagreb (3 nights.) I don’t want to plan too far ahead, but I want to at least keep an eye on train schedules so that I can guesstimate when we need to be where we’re going next. Fun stuff.
Last but not least, meet Princess and Jester, two of my constant travel companions.
I always keep two finger puppets in my camera backpack. Initially they were in there to get a kid to smile for a photo shoot, but I never took them out, and in the past year I've used them not only to get little kids to smile for the camera, but also to distract fussy toddlers on planes, buses, and while waiting for my school's graduation to start a couple of weeks ago. Today on the bus ride from Sveti Stefan to Budva, I used them to entertain the fussy toddler in front of us who kept trying to squirm out of his mom's arms and run around the bus. It was a good distraction for both of us, I think. :-)
.
**********
Where we are now:
View Larger Map
.