We drove all the way up a mountain again!! Take a look at these hairpin turns to get to the top and then having to walk 470 steps. When I got to the top I realized I was just seeing the exact same scenic view I had seen six times before and I was not happy.
Yes there was a statue and there was some coffin a couple stairs below (which we did not even go see) and I don’t know who this guy is and yet we took our life in our hands to get here.
Click. I was not a happy camper when I found out there was nothing to see here.
Click. I was a little testy.
When we left the mausoleum I found out we were going to have to go through 25 hairpin turns on the way down. They were numbered in large white letters. I saw #25 and then I saw it #3. I had my headphones on and my ears buried into a book. I was fed up with mountains!
This photo is just a sample of how the roads were — you didn’t get very far following this.
There’s also an airport in this photo — or at least a landing strip.
We stopped here and didn’t realize we were eating lunch — thought we were going to a cheese factory. So I ended up eating all this prosciutto (even though I’m not a meat-eater), since there wasn’t much else to eat. After I picked out the little pieces of fat it really was delicious.
OK I was mostly too afraid to even take photos,, but I got brave in this case. Look through the driver’s left hand side and see the bus coming at us, the next picture the bus is going, and the picture after that is look how close that bus was to us. In some cases we had to stop on the road and back up to let these buses go by. Terrifying!
Look at the car that’s coming at us and look how close this guy was to me in the back seat and this was on a narrow little road, hanging off the mountain. Terrifying!!
To top it off they were doing construction and there was a backup of traffic on the proper road, so Flori decides to get off the proper road and drive down this barricaded road. Back and forth, back and forth around all the barriers. My head was exploding.
He veered off the beaten path because it was going to take too long to get to the border so he went down these narrow tiny little roads that were like the back alleys of little towns and at one point on the top of a mountain we run into the earth movers without any safety precautions at all. I shouted something like this is gravel we’re gonna slide off and we’re all gonna die. That’s when my travel partners suggested I put on my headphones and read my book. We did not die.
Oh goody we got to drive up another mountain to see this castle. Does it look any different than the ones before? I think the lore on this castle was when they were building it, all the castle walls kept falling down every night and the Gods told the builders that a human being had to be sacrificed. The men decided they would not tell their wives and whoever showed up with their lunches first was going to die. But two out of three of the husbands told their wives so only one wife showed up, they explained the situation to her and she accepted her fate and then killed her. Disgusting.
I like the people in the background with their arms out and the lovers in the center.
Robert gave Robin a flower that he had picked from somewhere and she was getting a giggle out of it.
This was a different border from Montenegro into Albania which didn’t take quite as long as the first time around.
Here’s the van that we were going to be exchanging for a car, once we got to Tirana.