Montenegro

Kotor, Montenegro

This was our last stop of the cruise, before arriving to our disembarkation port of Venice.

I thought it was kind of a different port to stop in.  Montenegro is an off-shoot country like Kosovo and Croatia, so it is fairly new to it's own independence next to other countries in Europe.  We went quite a ways inland, up this very narrow, very deep Fjord.  That part was very majestic.  I was planning on paying a taxi to take us to one of the world famous beaches...but when we got there the plan kind of started to change.

 Kotor is this really cool, medieval city, complete with an intact city wall, many medieval market squares or plazas, and a fortress up on top of the side of the mountain.  You can kind of see the outline of it on the top of the ridge behind this little church.

Here is a portion of the city wall...it goes around the city, and then up the mountain side enclosing the fortress that sits above the city.

 I thought Matt should open up a law office here too...give this guy some competition :)

 So remember that fortress up the side of the mountain.  Well, Matt thought it was so cool, and I guess it is one of the big things to do here in Kotor.  He wanted to hike up part way to the fortress, just to get part of the experience... so we started.

This church was probably half way, so Matt was like, we are almost there...let's not stop now. 

So we pressed on ward...keep in mind that I thought we were going to go to a beach.  So we are lugging two bags full of beach and snorkel gear with us!

 More stairs....

Matt in his element (with one of the beach bags...)

We finally made it to the top!

That was a lot of stairs to climb.  Probably 500 at least we thought!

 The Venetians had conquered and ruled Kotor for a time, back in ancient times.

Look above Hannah, past all the graffiti and you can see a venetian lion...the symbol of Venice.

 This was taken from the cruise boat.  You can see St.John's fortress on the top of the front ridge if you look close.  At the right there is a prominent round ridge, then look directly left of that.  Then if you follow the line down, it looks like a shadow, but is actually the old city wall leading from the fortress down to surround the port city.

Here is a closer picture of the fortress, there up on the ridge above the old city wall.

We later googled it, and the climb was NOT 500 steps like I was thinking.  It was over 1300 steps ONE WAY!  We traversed over 2600 stairway steps that day.  

No wonder we were tired, and no wonder we had no time left to find a nice beach.

We lugged those two beach bags around for no reason...

 ...well almost no reason.

We still couldn't resist a small dip in the fjord.  We heard that water is very warm, and it was...just like bath water.

The girls found some crabs crawling around that they enjoyed following for an hour or so.

It was a very unique place to visit, and not one we would have seen if our ship hadn't stopped here.  I am still amazed that we all made that climb with minimal complaints, and minimal soreness.  

Our kids are troopers!