Brown baggin' raspberry wine in the Dubrovnik Hilton lobby

Sitting at the Hilton waiting for the sixt rent-a-car guy to show up so we can return our trusty VW, lovingly named "Dutch." so many nights spent sleeping in it... McCall misses it already. As the guy is walking out to check out our car mccall yells after him "just so you know we have the full insurance..." good thing because he noticed the scratch we put on it parallel parking, oops!

We woke up in Budva this morning at a nice little hostel, and were given fresh baked donuts by the kind woman who ran the place as we checked out, warm and delicious! Then we drove south to a little island we'd read about named sveti Stefan. It looked adorable from afar, unfortunately the whole thing is owned by a hotel now and you have to be a guest to enter so we didn't get to take the bridge to it to check it out, and they charged us for the 10 minutes we were parked in their parking lot! Rude.
Then we headed back up the coast through old town Budva where we stopped for our cappuccinos:) and checked out the citadel overlooking the water. After that we went to the walled city of kotor (a new favorite. Really cool architecture and gorgeous harbor nestled where the mountains meet the palm tree lined sea. On the way to Dubrovnik we also stopped very briefly in herzeg novi for a lemonade. We got our first parking ticket in Herzeg novi in the 26 minutes that we were there and couldn't find the pay meter. We tried to explain it to the woman that we didn't know how to pay but she didn't speak English and didn't seem at all interested and then this creepy man who spoke some English and was trying to tell us that he was some kind of private detective told us we were supposed to buy tickets at the cigarette and magazine kiosks in town... How were we supposed to know that?! Oh well the ticket was only 5€...
After a long day of driving up the beautiful coast of Montenegro (which BTW is apparently NOT where they filmed the "montenegro" scenes of casino royal) we have finally arrived in Dubrovnik. We're checked into the cute apartment which is a bit of a walk from old town but the people who run it are very nice and served us cookies and juice and thoroughly went over the map of the city with us. Their daughter is getting her masters of music at USC! And their son is some kind of professor at Harvard and they are excited that we are from America and that I am from LA. Trojan networking at work even here in Dubrovnik. The car is returned, we are settled into our apartment, having pizza dinner in old town and then heading back to deplete some of our wine supply (since apparently you can't ship alcohol to America from here...) looks like we have some re-packing to do-- mcCall is insistent that she "leave no bottle behind!" Wino. Haha
Dubrovnik is amazing. More on that tomorrow.
Cheers!