Medeni mjesec 2

I forgot to mention, dear reader, that this trip was an experiment in "packing light." Observe the size of my backpack in comparison to your standard Nalgene bottle. Yes, that's two weeks of travel gear in there. Although I admit that I was a bit nervous about the prospect of traveling with two pairs of pants and one skirt TOTAL, it worked out quite well...apart from the incident on the island of Lopud, in which Ecogrrl and her spouse were caught out in the middle of a lightning storm and sprinted madly for home across pitch-black fields...leading to the skirt's untimely demise. Yeah, running pell-mell through a tempest with lightning so intense that the memory plays like the world-ending storm at the end of a black-and-white movie? Can't say I recommend it. Particularly because passports do not like water. At all.

But the bag was great. Its innards bloated a little at the end, when I crammed in an extra couple of books because I'm insane enough to plow through two novels in the first week of a trip, necessitating the purchase of two more at a Dubrovnik bookshop and the Dublin airport. Apart from that, I'm truly impressed with how well it performed; it even emerged unscathed from the belly of a Ryanair plane.

The only real downside to packing light is the need to recycle the same clothes every few days, as demonstrated by Coalescent Boy. As you can see, however, CB remains his same handsome self -- and no one on Lopud (left) knew we wore the same things in Dubrovnik (right).








As an aside, note the ridiculous height of the aloe plants. These were not the largest specimens we saw -- the biggest were almost CB's height. Based on casual observations, *everything* grows lush and massive in Croatia's climate: figs plummet from city walls in Dubrovnik; squashes vie for space on arbors with grapes bursting their skins; limes the size of softballs droop from trees.

The only other drawback to spartan packing is doing the laundry, or, "Oh hell, we are out of socks and the ones I washed have not line-dried yet and now I must tie them to the outside of my pack so they don't make other things in my bag wet." Hey, at least you receive some amused smiles from people when you're traipsing around city streets with clean laundry streaming out behind you.