The day started off in a similar way to which the last had finished, with a nice beer. After getting up and stuff we headed to a local Tapas place for food. More details which I can’t remember about, the name of the place we went to and the name for the drink we had. It was basically lager with a load of lemon cordial in it. Very refreshing, perfect for that early drink. The Tapas here was also better than the stuff from the day before (did I mention we had Tapas the day before?), highlight was definitely the croquet style yummyness.

After foodage we wondered down to the Valladolid football Stadium where Nicko and Vicko are season ticket holders. Poor them I say.

The other reason to head down in the direction of the stadium was to check out the traveling zoo… well that’s atleast what it called itself. Turns out this is code for caravan with a couple of donkeys, which charges you an arm and a leg (I think maybe this is how they feed the animals?). So we skipped that and headed back into town to hit one of the locals for the end of the rugby, which of course Jefffo loved…

After the rugby we headed to pick up some more beer and a couple of bits and bobs from the garage whilst Vicko went on home to start preparing the roast dinner for the evening. And what a roast it was! I wish I’d taken pics of it, but was too busy scoffing it, definitely a 9/10!

Bad Reasons
1) Ice and abandoned cars on M40.
2) Severe delays and a reduced service on buses according to Ox Tube.
3) Radio advising to only make journeys which are vital.
4) It took 5 hours to get home yesterday.
5) I can do almost all my work remotely.

Good Reasons
1) There is one thing I need to do work wise today which requires me being in London, however if this place remains closed (as it was yesterday) this will negate the whole concept.

After waking up bright and early, OK stop there, what a lie. Our flight in was delayed which meant we didn’t get into Madrid until very late, and then had a number of hour drive to Valladolid. Luckily Nicko didn’t fall asleep… unluckily Vicko did meaning Nicko had no clue where to go. Funny scenes as you veer across lanes and slip roads. We survived, and got back in time for a beer, but there is always time for a beer, even when its 3.30am.

The plan for the day was to check out a bit of the city, grab some Tapas and head to the pub for some rugby. Sounds like a good plan to me, especially when we added in the siesta and Mexican we were going to have for dinner.

I will talk more about Valladolid tomorrow, as by then we will have had a much more in depth look around the place and actually taken some pictures. For today, I only captured one thing and that’s the Bullring. Unsurprisingly, that’s where they do the Spanish tradition of Bull Fighting. A totally pointless, ridiculous activity (not even going to classify it as a sport), saying that though if there had been any on whilst I was there I would have liked to go. Cultural experience and all that.

Pub was good, rugby was bad, we played like tools but still won. Joining us in the pub were a couple of Nicko’s mates, an Irish guy (and his visiting parents) and a Welsh guy. Good laugh. But it was very quickly siesta time. Siesta time confuses the body clock a bit, meaning that dinner isn’t really dinner, much more of supper. In Spain it is customary to not go out for food until 9 or 10 oclock.

I’ve no idea on the details of the Mexican place we went to, maybe Nicko or Vicko will fill some of those into the comments section below, but the one thing to say is that it is important to like cheese. Nachos as a starter consisted of a massive bowl of melted cheese with some tortillas sticking in it. It was nice, the Jalapenos were a hell of a lot tastier than the ones we get over here. Main course was enchiladas, guess what, lots of cheese. Not as much as Vicko got though, described as a blanket because you could fold it back. Slightly strange and it got very sickly quite quickly. Picture time, look at the boys looking all happy…

With some heavy cheese sweats / cramps going on we heading to another bar for a quick couple then retired home. Day done… How did everyone get on with Day 1’s quiz?

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Which basically entails walking a long way down Oxford Street, which is never a nice road to walk along due to the sheer volume of people.

Now Google has decided to offer up this route:

View Larger Map

Which is actually quite a tempting route, in my infinite wisdom, on the first day I found a route for myself:

View Larger Map

Comments?

Yep, that’s a sachet of Gin… yummy… not!

Why I hear you scream, why would he put us through reading more of his posts!? Because I’m evil, and so that if I refer back to anything on previous experiences over the next few days it will make sense. What is the point of me being pure comedy gold on paper screen if the audience doesn’t ‘get it’? Have you done it yet? I’ll wait…

… that should be just about long enough, warning there will be a test at the end. Anyway, back to the point, today I’m off to Spain. To be more precise I’m flying to Madrid and then getting a lift to Valladolid, making today a work and then travel day. I’m writing this on the way to London, to work from there for the day, a 9am meeting meant leaving the house at 6.30am, fun-tas-tic. After work heading straight to Gatwick, which shouldn’t take too long to jump on the evening flight to Madrid landing rather late. Because of the rather late landing Sir NickoBeano who I’m staying with has offered to come pick us up, what a gent.

I don’t really have much more to add right now, if you care, I’m travelling with @Jefffo.

Moving swiftly onto the promised quiz (if you get these all correct without reading the previous posts you could win a cookie – but its unlikely):

1) Name three of the Barbies I’ve been away with
2) Who did I see drop a simple catch at the MCG?
3) What was the name of the kick arse shop in Melbourne?

We walked down to the Old town to grab a bite of breakfast, a few bits and bob presents and to go to the beach. I had another cherry pastry, was good, better than the first one I had a few days before. We aimed for the main beach in Dubrovnik, it was uber busy and with the sun being so high in the sky there was little hope for shade. Or so it seemed, we found a brilliant spot by the rocks which had an arse shaped rock structure which was shaded by the bigger rock above, perfect. Cesekberry was pretty quickly off into the sea for snorkelling and lilo’ing. I hung on the rocks, watching the sea life before going in. There was lots to see in the water, not as much as the day before, but still lots of entertainment. The water was quite choppy though, which you would expect when massive cruise liners are passing through within hundreds of metres.

After spending all morning on the beach, we headed back to Gaffe for more of the cricket and lunch. I was extremely excited to see the Aussies 4 down, and even happier to see 4 wickets before lunch! The Aussies sitting in the bar around me were quick to leave!

I was dragged away from the cricket, well actually it went to lunch so we decided to leave. We headed for the Buza Bar, a place of brilliance, I’d received a recommendation from a colleague to check it out (Thanks Matt). Basically a bar built into the cliff face on the outside of the walls. You could get a drink, then walk down to the rock face to the sea and jump in and go swimming. Which is exactly what we did, from varying heights, I of course being boring did it from quite low. I however did not make as much of a scene as one fateful girl who had made her way up to the second highest rock we saw anyone jump from. She then spent maybe 45 mins quibbling with herself over whether to jump or not. By this time it had been noticed and there were a number of ongoing ploys to try and help her. Some of these were constructive some were less… to mention just a few, the kids (10 or 12 yrs old) jumping from there with no fear, the old man down the bottom apparently waving at her telling her not to jump, and the Americans on the rock with us who were finding it all very funny. Remark after remark being made, one even went up there and ran past her screaming before jumping. In the end she did it, good girl! We left at this point, I hope she has done it a number of more times since. Whilst in the sea at Buza, Gloating Barbie talked to a couple of Aussie chaps, who were not interested in the cricket at all, yet she still managed to tell them the score, good work.

It was now time to start the trek back to the apartment to get the bags and head to the airport, we decided that counting the steps up would be a positive move to distract us, guessing at around 200 we started going. The first flight of steps took us to 150 and the predictions changed rapidly. I said 372, I was well off! Not to bore you with the count, so here is just the end: 506, 507, 508! *pant* Grabbing the bags we headed for the bus stop, before a bus came a taxi did, so we thought scrap it lets get that. This was then the first time I have seen the temperature since I got there, 34C, and we just walked up 508 steps, feck me!

The bus was another strange experience, clearly too many people for the bus, and clearly a bundle (like at secondary school) would ensue, and sure enough it did. We won though, so got on the bus. Which was quite hairy, the cliffs we were hammering round were pretty steep to say the least. We got to the airport safe and sound, check in easy peasy. The arrivals board did however confuse me slightly, a flight from London Gatwick due at 19:45, was expected at 19:35 and listed as delayed. Hmm, pardon? No answer.

In true English fashion I bought a bottle of spirits at duty free and Cosmetic Barbie bought some perfume.

Then onto the plane, which is where I am right now writing this, enjoying my second stella and wishing I had bought more pistachio nuts. Fun fun times and a real shame to be nearly back home.

I will maybe do a summary post tomorrow with all the relevant links, also, if you are confused by dates I remind you that I am retrospectively going to be posting these over the 5 days I return due to the total lack of internet.

Today’s pictures and all pictures…

Cheers – remember, twitter me here @colinmercer or comment.
[Disclaimer - this post was written on Friday 31st July]

So that meant we were up, and had no excuse not to get up and get going. The benefit of such an early start walking down to the Old Town is much more pleasant due to the reduced heat, still tough on the calves but less sweaty (yummy). Down at Old Town we grabbed some bus tickets and had to wait only minutes for the bus to the ferry port. Still not entirely believing that we really needed to be there this early I was quite surprised to see a 30 person queue at the ticket shop already. I somewhat ate my words of sorts, so in true English style we joined the back of the queue and behaved ourselves. After nearly an hour the Catamaran arrived and the ticket shop opened, what the tourist chap had neglected to tell us was that the 50 KN only gets you ONE way, so its 100 KN to get there and back, cheeky! This put potty to our idea of hiring a ‘Mini Brum’ for the day and ragging around the island, in hindsight a brilliant decision.

We jumped on the Catamaran to Mljet and got sat, now something you need to know about me, I do not like boats/ferries/catamarans/being a long way out at sea. So this was most pleasant for me, it really didn’t help that I felt rough anyway and the cabin area was like an oven. Reading, eating, drinking didn’t work, leaving me with basically two options, get off and go for a rather long swim or sleep. I strangely enough chose option 2. We arrived, and you would suspect this to be the end of the transport carnage, but oh no! The ferry port was 3km from the National Park, walking is possible but advised against due to the crazy driving and the steep hill. So the only way we had to get there was on the park mini bus, no problem, well one, they only had two six-seaters for the 200 people who just got off the ferry. And once again, as is the custom in Croatia there is absolutely no queuing system, more on this later…

Once in the park things got a lot better, we took a wonder aimlessly around the coast of the park and we were hit by seemingly endless tranquillity, very easily we found a spot to swim where we could not see or hear another sole. What more can you ask for?

More snorkelling without drowning, and some attempted photos (I still don’t know how they came out, waiting on Paparazzo Barbie to put them online). Lunch was however rather expensive, being only one restaurant on the entire island this was always going to be the case! But it was good to eat some veg I guess… and as ever the beer was adequately cold and refreshing. There was also a chap there who was showing off his Mac Air and Iphone, he seemed to disappear after we loudly discussed the Grinder app… strange.

After lunch we headed onto the salt lakes, aptly names Big Lake and Small Lake (ish). Another chance for a swim, this time it was a fair bit busier but still lovely, and we saw clams on the bottom, which was definitely something new.

The other thing to see on the island was the old monastery, this was kinda weird to me, as the refurbishment is only halfway done. Couldn’t always work out what was new and what original, either a sign of good refurbishment work or that they’ve done nothing! Clearly I was thinking about it too much as I fell on my arse going down some steps, that sprung a chuckle from the mouths of some onlookers, grr! Stone steps and flop flips not a great mix, which is weird because so far I had managed all the steps down from the apartment without too much carnage.

With there being only one Catamaran off the island each day we wanted to make sure we made it, which meant giving ourselves plenty of time to get the mini bus back down to the port as well. As we arrived at the drop off point there were approximately 20 people waiting, in the customary semi circle style system, which basically meant if the van stopped near you jump on and thank your lucky star. However, this was not the case for everyone… as the second van opened it’s doors a frantic woman in a white top came barging through everyone and started ranting back and forth with another woman in a white top demanding that HER family had been here for ages and WERE getting on this van. Neither would step down, there was swearing, waving and general embarrassment for the families involved, their countries and themselves. It ended with about 12 people in the 6 seats and god knows what happened on the drive down…

On arrival back at Dubrovnik we had a little wonder down the harbour front, looking at the massive Yachts etc which were moored, and some which were being moored at the time. One was ridiculously big, called Galactica, what a beast. However there was another beast, of a Pug variety on one of them…

With little idea of what to do for dinner it felt only fitting to head the Irish bar, who had the cricket on! Perfect, and we brought the wicket of Katich. Woop. After dinner we went and grabbed a couple of cans of beer to take into the open air cinema we were attending that evening. The film – Gangster with Mr Depp. Sat down and it suddenly struck me, how the hell am I going to know what is going on? Luckily it was an English rip (yes I say rip – I have downloaded better quality movies) with Croatian subtitles. They had to keep it quiet I guess for licensing laws etc… if there are any, maybe just bad speakers. Either way it was quite, but not a terrible film. We walked back up to the apartment and passed out after an extremely long day!

See you tomorrow, for the last day.

All of today’s pictures here, and as ever the growing bulk here.
[Disclaimer - this post was written on Thursday 30th July]

The plan for today? Got down into town and hire a car, why a car I hear you scream, to go driving! Where to… Bosnia Herzegovina and Montenegro. Three countries (if you include Croatia) in one day.

Unfortunately the entire of Dubrovnik was out of hire cars, so instead we caught the bus up to Lapad Bay. Via a rather long winded route, thanks stupid bus driver man, a simple task for him yet he clearly failed. Anyway, we walked around the stone beach at Lapad and found a good spot, with some shade for me to hide in at times and lots of sun for Tanning Barbie. We read the paper which was purchased purely on the belief that Amy Winehouse was dead, it was a copy of The Sun, which cost £3, for Monday’s edition, it is now Wednesday. Forgetting this quickly we went swimming, and someone had the idea to race to the swimming area markers. Lifeguard Barbie being a pro swimmer gave me a head start, which meant I won, by an absolute mile! If I said the real scale of my win it wouldn’t look great for me, but I shouldn’t really care as I was just happy to make it all the way to the markers!

We grabbed some lunch in a little place just off the sea front, nice and cheap and the beer was cold and yummy. The plan for the afternoon was to hire out a Kayak and go exploring. Finally a plan to hire something which came off. We had 2 hours on the Kayak, and 2 people to power us, we could go a decent distance in theory. And that is what we did, I think, I will check it out on a map once I get to the internet. Which by time I post this I will be, so we went about: 2.5miles.

For dinner we could only find one place we fancied, and it just happened to be where we had lunch. We both had fish of varying varieties, Sea Food Sick Barbie’s didn’t go down as well as mine…

We grabbed the bus back to town and went for a couple of beers in the Old Town, via tourist information who told us the requirements to get to Mljet in the morning. We expected a 9:45 am ferry, we were told it was an 8 am ferry which you had to be at to buy tickets by 7 am. The alarm got set for 6 am at that moment and we decided many more than a beer would be a problem. The beer we did have was rather interesting, a bar with Cow coloured seats, a DJ being accompanied by a drummer and a group of Neo Nazi’s (I’m sure) sat next to us.

Another note for the day, in the morning when we were walking through Old Town to get to the car rental place, we saw the changing of the guards (each end of Old Town has a gate, east and west) we followed the two guards and their ceremonial drummer all the way through Old Town. We will be in the background of about 90% of photos taken of them that morning, they cleared a really efficient route through the crowd. When they got to their finishing spot, the drummer said something to the two guards, we really hope it was along the lines of “you’ve got people watching you, do it properly”.

Today’s photos can be found here, and once again the ever growing collection of all pictures are here.

More tomorrow!
[Disclaimer - this post was written on Wednesday 29th July]

And what do you do there? You basically have an island to explorer, numerous beaches, an almost infinite number of places to get into the sea, a botanical garden, a fort and lots of rich looking people with their boats. We started off with walking, and checked out the botanical gardens before becoming convinced we had earned ourselves a swim in the ocean. I had been getting warnings from some people who had been before about how you need rubber shoes to go in the sea due to the sharpness of the rocks and these famously tricky black sea urchins which can get proper nasty, we’re talking spikes, infections and death. Fun fun, so in we plod, no shoes, the rocks are sharp getting into the sea but no problems other than the underwater slipperiness of the algae. I was also a little concerned I had burnt my feet, they had been looking very red for a while now and was excited by the prospect of them being in cool water. So you can imagine my lack of surprise at how they felt slightly sore after a bit of swimming. We played around, I drowned a little trying to snorkel and drank some water, usual stuff really then headed back to shore. Where I looked at my, embarrassingly, sunburnt foot, however it was only my little toe that was hurting and on closer inspection it became rather apparent rather quickly that this wasn’t sunburn. The ominous black spikes were well and truly wedged in my toe, nicely under the skin. Enter very small levels of alarm, not from the pain, but from the guidebook which explained the nastiness of these said black sea urchins. I managed to rip the first one out myself, the outcome was a little blood and a black spike, about half a cm long and 3 mm wide, doesn’t sound huge but when its under the skin it stings a little. At this point I had to hand over to Surgeon Barbie, we spent the next 10 mins with her nails cutting my toe to get the remaining spikes out, fun times, you will be happy to hear I have survived and haven’t yet had to have my foot amputated.

This is what the little buggers look like, courtesy of Wikipedia:

We went and grabbed a pint, which I felt I had thoroughly earned, and ate our picnic. That’s when the real walking started, we managed to find a route to get to the opposite end of the island, via a majorly high fort, steep to say the least. On the other side we walked on and found another beach to swim from. This time there were more black sea urchins, but Snorkel Barbie found they were deeper out and found none in the shallow. Easy pickings to get to a depth I couldn’t touch the bottom at. So no bites/pricks/spikes and I didn’t drown snorkelling this time, I’m getting better. I also climbed the rocks to snap this picture, using continuous image capture and Windows Live Photo Gallery, it really is a little gem!

Bigger Size

After the walk back to the conventional end of the island we went to check out the dead sea, a salt water lake on the island, the image below doesn’t do it justice! The cave was cool and NO deadly creatures, just a retired rope swing.

Moving on we grabbed a beer whilst waiting for the ferry to come pick us up so we could go get Mexican for dinner! Much excitement ensued, until the near hour wait for the food to come. And the food wasn’t great, don’t get me wrong it was nice, but not worth the wait, or money. But the beer was nice!

More beer before starting the daunting walk back up to the apartment complex we are staying in, nice early night, big plans for tomorrow, really hoping they come off!

You can check out all the pictures of Lokrum here, or all the ones I have taken here.
[Disclaimer - this post was written on Tuesday 28th July]