Month: May 2025

For most of this month we stayed close to home, satisfying our wanderlust with some small bus trips to nearby Kallmünz and Donaustauf. The two towns are quite similar: they are built around an acropolis with castle ruins and are surprisingly quiet on a balmy Saturday afternoon. Our time there was spent mostly climbing up to check out the ruins.

Our major destination in April was Dubrovnik (Croatia), a location chosen by my wife as a birthday treat. We stayed in the old city, which was gorgeous and impeccably clean. It reminded me of Mdina in Malta but with things to do! The city was constructed by filling in a horseshoe of rocky area at the base of a mountain. So each side of the city has streets of stairs meeting in the flat centre. One tour guide told us of having to help his cousin with a new fridge, taking it down one side of the town and up the other. They no longer speak. We spent our time in the city visiting museums, churches, and palaces (the usual) and took a few tours: one in kayaks around the city and to a nearby island, one on a boat to three other islands, and one on a bus to Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina (not recommended: the town is everything Dubrovnik was not, including interesting, and the wait at the border was interminable). In sum, it was one of the highlights of our time in Europe.

I mentioned in …