The weather is hot and sunny. We’re starting to get acclimated so the heat doesn’t bother us like it did. Dubrovnik and Paris are the only cities that warranted returning to after last year and for good reason too. Paris is well, Paris. If I need to say more you need to go there. Dubrovnik is always nice and we never stay long enough. It doesn’t look like we’ll get to go to Montenegro and the Bay of Kotor which I wanted to do nor will we see Korcula which bums me a bit. Oh well, we’ll be back next year. We went back to the place with the wonderful squid and it wasn’t as wonderful this year. I don’t know what changed but I’m going to go back and look at my pictures to see what’s different. It was good, and still better than any other I’ve had but just not awe inspiring. Maybe our taste buds have gone to the next level, maybe they changed it… I don’t know. We spent the day trying to find an Internet connection fast enough to upload pictures. Our attempt was unsuccessful. They’re fast enough for blogging and email but as soon as I start to upload pictures the connection speed drops to about 17kbs which is way too slow. It takes about 1.5 minutes per picture. At that rate I have about 6 hours of pictures to upload. We have an apartment reserved in Ljubljana on July 8th so we need to get there by then. We wanted to stay at Plitvice National Park for one night on the way but because we had to go to Split first because of ferry schedules we ran out of time. The bus from Ljubljana to Zagreb is about 12 hrs or so. I didn’t want to stay on a hot sweaty bus for 12 hrs so I decided to check out flying from Dubrovnik. The plane to Zagreb ended up costing 1800 Kuna which is about $300. The bus from Split cost us $60 and I was estimating the bus from Split to Zagreb costing $80 or $90. So the bus would be half as much as flying via Croatia Airlines but we’d have to suffer for a day. After thinking it through we bought our tickets to Zagreb from Atlas travel which we used last year for our Hydrofoil tickets from Split to Ancona. The Dubrovnik airport is about a 40 minute drive outside the city and cost 200 Kuna ($35) to get there. I thought this was expensive so I double checked with the Tourist Information and they said that was the standard rate. The son of the man who rented us the apartment drove us in his car. People here drive as crazy as the Italians. If in the States you were caught driving backwards on the wrong side of the street for half a block while dodging traffic and even having to get up on the sidewalk to let cars by you’d be thrown in jail. Here it’s considered the quickes way to get to the interesection. We arrived at the Dubrovnik airport intact a little over 30 minutes later. It’s actually a beautiful drive because you drive up on the mountains above the city and it would have made a perfect photo had we had time to stop. The airport is probably the right size considering Dubrovnik is the largest city in many miles and it’s only 40,000 people large. There were 9 gates in a building the size of a 777. Most people were shuttled to their airplanes but ours was in front of our gate so we walked to it. It was an Airbus A320 so it was decent sized. The flight took about 50 minutes. If you aren’t familiar with jets this means it flew up to it’s cruising altitude then started to desend into Zagreb immediately. In the past I gave Virgin Atlantic top marks for their beautiful flight attendents but Croatia Air beats them out easily. Next time I may fly Croatia Air just for the scenery.