Bosnia. Day one, part two

So, why are we in Croatia and Bosnia, anyway? Partly family vacation, but partly a much more important reason.

Chris has a friend who is former British Army. And he was stationed in a town in Bosnia during the conflict. The town has stayed important to him, and he has organized a marathon run to raise money to build a library and all-weather football pitch for the local school. Chris is one of a handful of runners who will be running the marathon today. 

My memories of the Bosnian war aren't many. It was the first half of the 1990s, I was a college student who didn't read the newspaper, and it was before we all got our information overload from the Internet. 

Our guides here have shown us where British  observation posts were and the memorial markers of several fallen British soldiers, as well as some incredible views of the river and town of Gorazde. We have also been given an oversight of the history of this area. Incredible.

The hotel where we are staying is an upscale hunting lodge where hunters come to hunt bear. We are clearly here off season as we are the only guests. It is a nice place, updated and very clean and nice. Not luxurious, but quite nice.

The hotel's restaurant put on a huge lunch spread. It was an amazing amount of food and all delicious.

We drove out in a four car convoy to see some of the military areas of significance.

Interesting that there are cows just wandering loose. These two decided to 

Race us down the road!

Here is a sneak peek of our room at the lodge...

And dinner last night...

And dessert

Bosnia... Day one

Wow. What a difference a day makes. We woke up this morning and checked out of our hotel and drove our rental cars over the border into Bosnia.

We stopped at a gas station to use the restrooms and buy snacks

The paprika and chili flavors were not bad. The ketchup flavor was truly awful (although the kids liked them) and the chocolate with cookie attached was delicious.

We found snow! We are up in the mountains and although it isn't that cold, there is still a good bit of snow around on the ground. 

Here are the cabins at the bear hunting resort we are staying in.

More tomorrow...

Dubrovnik day two...

I had composed an awesome blog post throughout the day yesterday and it was 99% complete and just as I went in to upload it... It disappeared. So sad. The wonders of technology. Sigh.

So I will do my best to reconstruct it.

We began the day by purchasing bus tickets from the hotel for the city bus into Old Town - the original walled city. The tickets cost the equivalent of £1.60 round trip for all five of us - total. 

After a fairly scenic and quick trip to the old town, we began exploring.

There are orange trees all around the old town.

There's always an Irish pub everywhere, isn't there?

We were wandering around the nooks  and crannies of the city and found a square where a green market was being held. We purchased some homemade orange peel candy and kept wandering.

There was another small market set up around the corner and I saw a table filled with the brightest colored fruits and vegetables. I said to chris, "look how pretty that produce is. It almost doesn't look real." As we got closer, we discovered why that was - it wasn't real! So we touched it and a man said "please don't touch". Another man smiled at our confused faces and explained that they were making a movie. That was when we looked around and realized all the market stalls were a bit too perfect. So, picture us, American tourists, wandering right into the middle of a movie set!

There were cats everywhere around. Sophia began counting them and this one, I believe, was number 8.

After wandering awhile, we decided to stop at one of the many sidewalk cafes. 

I have wifi again now that we are at the lodge (more about that later), so I'm going to go ahead and publish! More later!