Another birthday...another unexpected place!

Birthday girl on the ferry to Korcula Island, Croatia

One of the things we have enjoyed in our latest series of adventures is waking up on our birthday in rather surprising locations. I celebrated my 60th, for instance, with our first trip to Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda, seeing lions relaxing in the morning sun after a busy night's hunt. Theresa had HER 60th in the decidedly more decadent surroundings of Venice, and this year, we celebrated her latest (although it was confusing, because she looks even younger than she did then) in Sarajevo with dinner at a mountainside restaurant, and then a spectacular weekend trip back to the sun-drenched Dalmatian coast.

She likes to point out that her birthdays come at a better time of year than mine, and OK, I admit that's true, especially if celebrated in places like Capri where the wisteria is dripping both color and fragrance all around. This year was like that. We drove to the coast and -- nostalgia! nostalgia! -- boarded a small ferry that took us to the island of Korcula. The tourists who will fill the island in the summer had not yet arrived, but the sun had, and with it, the flowers and the light, light, light everywhere. White rocks, azure water, olive trees, wine grapes just producing green shoots, white and purple wild iris along the roadsides, poppies, lemons hanging from trees.

...And after a day in the sun, and a picnic with local wine. Heaven!

We stayed in a small place along the waterfront, sipping our coffee on the terrace while the nuns in the neighboring convent hung up their sheets or tended to their gorgeous garden. We ate in a restaurant where they make their own goat cheese, their own olive oil, their own wine, their own pasta, their own brandy (deadly, that last one). We, or at least I, swam in the chilly Adriatic, and we picnicked on the rocks at another of its coves.
And so we have marked another birthday, another country, another new and remarkable place. It makes us miss home, at least in part, when we celebrate so far away from everyone we care about. But for now, we wouldn't have it any different. Happy birthday, Theresa!