ALBANIA: "LOWER" BERAT

After spending several hours in Berat's lonely castle (which really isn't a castle but more of an enclosed city), our guide Elton took us to other parts of the city.

But first we had to become acquainted with a few friendly local residents:

(I think these are the lawnmowers of Berat.)

BERAT, ALBANIA: The Castle

Driving into Berat, Albania, was easy compared to the prior four hours of wandering around the rest of the country. Bob reminded me after my last post that we had printed out some driving directions for the drive from Ohrid to Berat that failed us because the directions tried to put us on new roads that had been under construction for a long time and certainly should have been done by now--but weren't, requiring detours down unknown roads.  Surprise, surprise.

Once in Berat, however, we were able to connect quickly with the tour guide our original tour guide had been kind enough to arrange for us, a very knowledgeable and interesting Albanian named Elton. He has degrees in archaeology and history, so he really knows his stuff. I felt almost guilty using him as a tour guide. This is a man who should be leading an excavation or restoration project, but unfortunately Albania does not have the money to pay him to do that.

We made our way from our parking spot up some very old stone pathways

towards the castle overlooking the city:

LOST IN ALBANIA

Disclaimer: I'm warning you now that almost all the photos in this post are taken through the car window. They aren't my finest photos. There's a good reason for that, which I'll get to in a bit.

We had outlined a whirlwind day for Albania. The plan was to drive west from Lake Ohrid towards the Adriatic, but then head southeast to Berat, the main attraction (at least for us) in Albania.  We had a guide planned for the morning and a trip to Kruje planned for the afternoon, and then we were going to drive north towards our hotel near Tirana, the capital of the country. It's about 85 miles from Ohrid to Berat, and we allowed a generous two hours for the drive.

Hah.

I think this was by far the most stressful driving day of the entire trip. Yes, even worse than approaching Sarajevo from the northern border of Bosnia rather than from the more common southern direction. Much worse.

Everything started off just fine. We had an easy border crossing and stopped to exchange money and get gas.  Gas, by the way, was $1.70/liter, or about $6.50/gallon. Yikes.  Who can afford that in a country where the average monthly income is about $335? Anyway, right away we could see that language was going to be a problem. No one, I mean NO ONE, spoke English. We had better luck speaking to these two cute bunnies at the gas station (probably destined for someone's dinner) than we did communicating with the Albanians.

No worries. The scenery, as usual in the Balkans, was lovely, and the distance wasn't that far.  We didn't have GPS, but we had a really good map.

MACEDONIA: LAKE OHRID

As a reminder of our itinerary, we spent a day in Skopje, Macedonia, and then we took a little detour to Prizren, Kosovo. (See prior posts.) After spending another night in Skopje, we headed southwest for the incredibly lovely three-million-year-old Lake Ohrid (pronounced AWK-rid by locals), located on the border of Macedonia and Albania.

Our drive from Skopje to Ohrid, about 125 miles, was beautiful, full of sights like this family working what is either a very small farm or a very large garden. We saw scenes like this quite a few times as we drove around the Balkans. (Excuse the poor quality of the photo--I took it from the car window as we sped past.)

There were also a lot of campaign billboards. This guy seemed to be the front-runner, at least if the number of billboards was an indicator.  However, apparently at least one person didn't like him:

Lake Ohrid is about 20 miles long and almost 1,000 feet deep, one of the deepest lakes in Europe.

The town that lounges on its banks is full of Byzantine churches, a castle on the hill, and a wonderful old town shopping district (which, alas, we spent only 30 minutes exploring).

KOSOVO, LITTLE MIRACLES Part 2

I've had a six-week hiatus from posting about our trip to the Balkans while Life Happened (e.g., school started, I had a major publishing deadline, I had some church assignments, we took a trip to Colorado, etc. etc.) It's time to go back to Kosovo and finish up.  

As I discussed in my first post about Kosovo, we had a truly outstanding guide named Inan who spoke beautiful English and spent the day with us in Prizren. One of the many highlights of the day was a short hike he took us on to visit the medieval fortress that overlooks the city. 

On our way up, up, up!

Although it is now largely in ruins, a few sections of the fortress constructed much later than the original Byzantine walls are still intact.  

COLORADO: THE GREAT MUSHROOM HUNT

As I mentioned in my previous post, Bob takes our sons to Colorado every summer to go hiking. Sam, like Bob, enjoys going to the summits, but Andrew is more interested in what can be found below treeline: mushrooms.  His interest in mushrooms began in a botany class at UCLA, and a few years ago he joined the Los Angeles Mycological Society, where he has learned even more about mushrooms at lectures, at fairs, and on field trips.

Andrew and I would follow Bob up to treeline (although sometimes he got there hours before we did), and then for the next four to six hours we would slowly make our way back down to the trail head, searching under trees and bushes on and off trail for, primarily, the somewhat elusive King Bolete mushroom, the most prized of the Colorado mushrooms:

COLORADO SCENERY

I have been buried by work for about the last month.  Not only did the semester start three weeks ago, but I had a HUMONGOUS deadline with the publishing company I work for set for September 9th.  I have been sitting at this desk in front of this computer with my eyes glazed over for far too many hours.  The good news is that Friday afternoon I completed the deadline three days ahead of schedule!

I finally have a few minutes to work on a blog, something I haven't done since August 8th.  That may be the longest I've gone without blogging since I started up this little venture.  We do currently have house guests, but they are self-sufficient and I've slipped away for a few minutes to finish this off.

In early August, Bob and Andrew and I took a five-day trip to Colorado just before school started for me.  This is a trip Bob and Sam and Andrew usually take together, but since Sam couldn't go this year, I was the lucky sub.

Bob's goal on these trips is always to climb as many Fourteeners, or mountains in excess of 14,000 feet, as possible.  There are 68 in the United States, and he has now climbed 30. On this trip, he climbed Quandary Peak, La Plata, and Yale.  (He would have climbed Princeton as well had I not been along, but that's a story for another day.) Because on Bob's blog he writes extensively about his experience on each mountain, I decided my posts about our trip would focus mainly on scenery and people, so this post and the following one will be picture-heavy and text-light.  

Andrew is less interested in bagging a summit than he is in bagging some wild mushrooms, so generally he and I would follow Bob up to tree line (about 12,000 feet in elevation), and then make our way slowly back down the mountain, looking for highly desirable King Boletes, truly the king of wild mushrooms. I'll cover our mushroom harvests in the next post.  

And so, without further ado . . .