One last day in Croatia

After several days of cool and cloudy weather we awoke to bright sunshine, so I have to show another view from our hotel room with blue skies and bright lighting.

We had left the car in the parking garage for awhile, but decided to do a little car touring on our last day in Dubrovnik.  We dropped down the hill and worked our way around the harbor to the peninsula shown above, then back to the south toward the walled city, where Annette wanted to buy some things she had seen the day before.  So, while she did that I roamed around to the north of the walled city with the intention of going to see the exhibits at the Revelin Fortress.  However, I could never find the proper path to the Fortress so just wandered around and snapped some photos from different vantage points.

With a bag of souvenirs and a lot fewer kunas in our pockets we headed toward the small town of Cavtat, which our guidebook said was worth a visit.  The road hugged the steep cliffs and provided a nice view back to Dubrovnik.

The second shot is zoomed in on the old walled city, on the water's edge in the left foreground.  We soon came to Cavtat, a pretty little coastal town about 18 kilometers south of Dubrovnik.  There are several small churches in Cavtat that we visited, but the main draw is a cemetery on a hilltop overlooking the Adriatic.  In the early 1920s a prominent family in Cavtat commissioned the famous Croatian sculptor Ivan Mestrovic to design and build a mausoleum in the cemetery.  The mausoleum can be seen at the top of the hill in the photo below.  You may be able to see it if you click on the photo to enlarge the image.  We could sorta see some statues by Mestrovic through the keyhole of the mausoleum, but unfortunately it was locked when we visited.

We roamed around Cavtat for a few hours, had dinner and returned to Dubrovnik after dark.  On the way back I pulled into an INA gas station to fill up the car, since we would be dropping it off at the Dubrovnik airport the next morning.  After gassing up I pulled back on the road and was quickly stopped by a Croatian policeman.  Since we were near the border with Montenegro I thought it must be some sort of an immigration check, but it turns out I crossed a solid white line on the road when I left the INA station.  It was a situation where you could only access the gas station legally if you were heading south on the road, but I was heading north, so I actually illegally crossed the solid line twice.  I apparently played the "dumb American" role well and with his limited English he seemed to get pretty frustrated with me and just motioned for me to go on my way. It wasn't until the next morning when we passed the gas station again that we actually figured out what the problem was the night before.  So, luckily I didn't spend my last night in Croatia in a jail cell.