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Omis is a small town right on the sea with cliffs towering over it and a river leading to it.  The old town section is inland about a block and is quite small, but very attractive.  It’s basically one street with some tiny alleyways leading to it.  The houses are made of squared off stones…

As I left the Dubrovnik area for a jaunt into Bosnia Herzegovina, I planned to head up the Croatian coast on the D8 and was figuring out whether to go through the Neum Corridor (a narrow; only 9 kms long- chunk of Bosnia Herzegovina that touches the coast) necessitating going through an international border three…

One advantage of having a car when you travel, is that you can stay in places that aren’t central and therefore pay a bit less for your accommodations.  For example, I booked an AirBNB studio about 10 kms, from Dubrovnik in the Mlini, with a great view of the Srebreno harbor, for 40 euros.  What…

I flew from Belgrade to Tivat, a quick 50 min flight, but it felt long as we had turbulent air for the whole trip. I wondered why the pilot didn’t change altitude to escape it, but as we went below the clouds to land, I realized that we had been going over mountains that were…

My plan initially was to go from Athens to Sofia and Sofia to Belgrade, BECAUSE there were train lines between those cities.  Well, none of those lines were working when I was traveling, so I ended up buying a bus ticket, for a six hour ride, from Sofia to Belgrade. The ride was fine except…

I arrived in Sofia late on Orthodox Easter Sunday and when I started to explore the city the next day I was amazed to see empty streets.  Turns out the day after Easter is also a holiday.  The neighborhood had lots of bars and graffiti (loved the name of this tattoo parlor), but also a…

Athens is a large (4.5 million), gritty city in which half of the population of Greece lives. Even the wealthier, more touristy areas have abandoned, roofless buildings, but it didn’t feel like a dangerous city to me (view from my airBNB). The Acropolis dominates the center of the city and there are several other towering…

I was intent on going to Meteora, a cool site in northern Greece where there are monasteries perched precariously on rock outcroppings, and had booked a hotel there well in advance. As the time approached however, I realized that getting there by train as I’d planned was not going to be possible. A terrible train…

I took a Blue Star Ferry (enormous car ferry) from Piraeus to Santorini in early April. The trip took almost eight hours, stopping very briefly at Naxos and Paros. An economy ticket entitled me to unassigned seating in salon spaces where there were tables and chairs and upholstered benches. I wanted to sit near the…

After reading the book Theater of Dreamers by Polly Samson, I became interested in Leonard Cohen’s early years on Hydra. When I saw there was a place available on the island through the Home Exchange website, I immediately contacted the owner to see if he’d be interested in an exchange. We agreed I’d be at…