Day 11 - Trip to the Elaphite Islands

As I said previously, today was a big day! We had to meet at 10:30am (4:30am Indiana time) at the ferry dock for a boat tour of some nearby islands. It was also a "booze cruise" of sorts with free alcohol and a provided lunch (all for about $45). It was a great deal and about 2/3 of our group was planning on going, so I decided to go as well.

We had to take the ferry (like we took the day before) to Dubrovnik to board the larger ship. It was supposed to look like a pirate ship, but I'm not so sure it did. It was a good size and we got a spot on the upper deck, which was great for sight-seeing (and more pictures, of course). The trip to the first island took a while so we only had about 40 minutes to check it out.

This island was called Kolocep. I don't have many pictures of this island because we all headed straight for the beach. It was a sandy beach, so all of were very excited! We are used to our pebble beach and it was so nice walking barefoot into the water. As I said, we were only there a short time, but it was enough to enjoy the little beach and get back onto the boat for lunch.

Most people had the fish. It was a whole fish, grilled with the head still on. It was pretty gross looking. I had the mystery meat plate, which tasted pretty good, so I couldn't complain. (Sidenote - I actually did try some fish! I had some white fish from Stacy's plate at dinner last night and it wasn't too bad. I just can't get over the fact that they leave the heads on and all of the bones intact, etc.) I did have some wine at lunch, but I wasn't really into the "boozing" part of the cruise. Instead I went through about 3 liters of water because the sun was so strong all day.

The next island we stopped at was Lopud. It wasn't the biggest of the islands, but it had more area for us to wander around and check out. So, we were able to stay there for about 2 hours. I walked around with some people and bought an amazing ice cream cone with cookies and pistachio ice cream. It hit the spot!

Then Jeanna (pronounced Gina) and Raymond, two other IU-Indy students found a spot on some rocks to sunbathe. Raymond snorkeled but I stayed out of the water. We had an incident a few days ago where someone got bitten/stung? by a sea urchin, so now I'm leary of going into the water if those are nearby.

After a while, we hit our third island, Sipan. They shouldn't have even bothered bringing us to this one because we were only there for 30 minutes. There really wasn't much to do except go in a shop and wait around to load the boat again.

The shop in Sipan did have some pretty inexpensive pool shoes, so I finally bought myself a pair. They're baby blue and looked pretty high quality for less than $15, I figured it was a good deal. So, now I can go in the water and be less afraid of sea urchins.

We returned to Mlini sometime after 6pm (Noon Indiana time) and I was starving, so Matthew, Ruth (another IU-Indy girl) and I had dinner at the little hotel pizza place. Then I went to my room, showered and realized that although I was applying my SPF 55 generously all day, I still ended up with a sunburn on my shoulders, forehead and nose. It's not horrendous but I plan on wearing some shirts with sleeves for the next few days. :)

Since then I've just been catching up on the emails, etc. I still haven't gotten anyone on the phone yet. I would like to sometime soon. I don't know if any of you have Skype, it's where you can call other people with it for free over the internet. Adam set it up on my computer, so if you have it, I can probably call you. My name on there is christine.reynolds4. I haven't used it successfully yet, but I'm hoping to soon.

Well, I need to get going. It's getting late here and I need to be up early for a trip a small group of us have planned to see Montenegro tomorrow. Hope to hear from you all soon!