Croatia and Montenegro, May 2017--Going Solo

For several years now, traveling with Ron has not been easy. There were times when he got confused at being in a strange place, especially when he woke up. He had limited energy, so often he fell asleep in the afternoon or was ready for bed right after dinner, while I was still wide awake. Walking excursions, the main attraction on a cruise, proved difficult because he couldn't keep up. It was upsetting that he didn't tell me when he started feeling pain, and then blamed me when he was really hurting. Worst of all was that I didn't know whether he was enjoying himself or not. I sometimes felt guilty because he didn't seem to be getting anything out of the vacation I was looking forward to so much. It was becoming clear that what for me was a much-needed, stimulating adventure was for him an ordeal.


In January of this year I tried an experiment. When I went off to the SCS meeting in Toronto, I called in a caretaking service, Family Home Care, and arranged for a visiting caretaker to drop in for a two-hour shift every other day. I also bought him a FreedomAlert pendant so that he could press a button to call 911 in an emergency. Both measures proved successful. While Ron didn't think he needed the caretaker, he welcomed the company, and he himself was happy to have a means of summoning help in case he was by himself when he fell.


This May, a week after the semester ended, I arranged for a caretaker again to cover my ten-day absence on a Road Scholar small group tour of Croatia and Montenegro by ship. It was a way of winding down from what had been a difficult year. In the fall I had taught CLAS/GWS 362 to a very diverse class including Black, Muslim, Native American, and transgender students. Getting them through post-election panic and depression took tremendous finesse and tact. Consequently I had not given as much time and thought as I usually do to preparing my spring Latin reading course on Martial and Juvenal. I had taught these authors once before, using the same textbooks, and figured the number of lines from Martial's epigrams I assigned and the selections I chose were about right for students at the 4xx/5xx level, but I had miscalculated badly and we fell behind at once. We struggled through the first four weeks reading only about half of what I expected. Then it turned out that they found Juvenal (Juvenal!) much easier than the previous class had, so I wound up preparing extra lectures, PowerPoints, and discussion sessions to fill in the class time after they had finished translating. It didn't help that one of the graduate students was forever nitpicking the translation and taking issue with statements in the commentary. I got through the semester, as I always do, but I knew it wasn't one of my stellar performances and I needed something else to think about.

Since my flight from Phoenix took off at 7:00 a.m., I arrived at the Stagecoach Shuttle at 2:45. The itinerary, from Phoenix to Dulles and then to De Gaulle, followed by a connection to Split, was a demanding one, so I was pretty wiped by the time the program director, Luči, met us at the airport and took us to the Cornaro Hotel. This was a small hotel, and not all its facilities were in operation--supposedly there was a rooftop spa and a downstairs wine bar, both closed. After a get-acquainted meeting, the 23 participants had dinner in the hotel dining room--excellent seafood, as I recall. Then I went out to look around the neighborhood and buy a hat, something I always forget to pack.

It was nice to discover that the hotel was within easy walking distance of Diocletian's Palace, the object of the next day's excursion. Ron and I had visited it during a previous trip to Croatia, but there was a lot we missed. I didn't know, for example, that the statue of John the Baptist in the former Temple of Jupiter was by the Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović, about whom Luči was quite informed--we learned a great deal about him. During the lunch break, which was on our own, I took the time to watch the Emperor Diocletian come out of the palace to address the crowd in passable Latin (he was, after all, Dalmatian by birth, so it wasn't his first language). Touristy, but neat.

The next day we embarked on the ship, which was indeed small. Besides the dining room, which was also used for lectures and other events, there was no fully enclosed space apart from the cabins. There was a seating area in back of the dining room with steps leading down to the main deck cabins, but it was only partially roofed. Forward, on the top deck, there was a lounge area, of course without a swimming pool. Those were the only two common areas in which to hang out. I had brought along a PDF of the ms. I was reviewing for Cambridge UP and had hoped to make considerable progress on it. But working on my computer in public was difficult, as people were always interrupting me, and I had no real desk space in the cabin itself. While our choice of beverages at lunch and dinner included a beer or glass of wine, sitting around with drinks after dinner wasn't an option, as the bar closed as soon as dinner had been served. People generally split up and went to their cabins. I'm afraid I started to feel claustrophobic after a while.

It was encouraging that more than half the people on the tour were women traveling by themselves or as a twosome. Obviously no one saw anything odd in the fact that I had left my husband at home--there were others who had done exactly the same thing. I did hit it off with two women in similar circumstances, so I had people to go around with. It was also nice that many of the solo women were academics. Since Road Scholar attempts to offer learning adventures, we were given a great deal of historical background, dealing chiefly with recent events--Luči recounted her experience of the Balkan War as a student in Kosevo--but also some classical and medieval history as well. Troubled relations with the Venetian Empire came in for a lot of discussion, especially when we arrived in Dubrovnik. 

Sites visited on the various islands were mostly medieval and Early Modern cathedrals and monasteries. On one fairly drizzly day, we hiked in National Park Mljet to a saltwater lake, where we took a boat trip to, guess what, a twelfth-century monastery. Museums were not that interesting, except for the Meštrović Gallery in Split, whose permanent exhibition houses a large collection of the sculptor's works from all periods. We did stop twice for lunch in Dalmatian villages, once at a family farm owned by a priest (he inherited it after his family were casualties of the Balkan War) and once at a well-known vineyard on the road to Montenegro. Dubrovnik was the high point, and walking around the city walls a memorable experience. In the opening episode of this season's Game of Thrones, Cersei and Jamie look out to sea from the battlements of the Red Keep, which are famously the Dubrovnik city walls; it was a thrill to realize that I had been exactly where they were standing.

Montenegro, where we spent the last two days of the tour, reminded me amazingly of an Italian town, with the population taking an evening passeggiata along the main street of Herceg Novi (as opposed to the riva, which was where our hotel was located). I truly loved the Cat Museum in Kotor, which I visited on my own, and wish I had allotted more time to it. There are no actual cats (except for the mascot, asleep in her bed), but plenty of amusing cartoons and cat kitsch, including a wall of four-color pages from the Corriere del Sol illustrating amazing cat stories (e.g. a mother cat receiving a medal from the mayor and the town council of an Italian village for rescuing her five kittens, one by one, from a fire).

The hotel we stayed in was a fairly expensive resort right on the beach. For some reason, one of the assigned rooms was a suite, and they gave it to me--probably because the door of my cabin on the ship was constantly sticking and I had to call crew members down to open it several times. Dinner was, again, at a long reserved table in the hotel dining room, but I had a privileged seat right next to all the events at the farewell dinner and was able to snap a great picture of Luči being presented with a gift of appreciation, and a well-deserved thank you from all of us.

In retrospect, everything about the Croatia trip was fine except for the limited options onboard. The food both on ship and on land was superb, the native Croatian wines I sampled excellent (derived mostly from the Primitivo grape, the ancestor of Zinfandel), and the field trips generally interesting. Too many monasteries, but that was to be expected. The lesson I've learned from this experience is to  travel with Road Scholar, but be selective about where you are going and the type of cruise ship involved--pick larger vessels. Next March I'm booked to go to Jamaica and Cuba aboard an Aegean Odyssey ship, and in July I will be going to Iceland, again with Aegean Odyssey. For all my many trips to Italy and England by myself, cruising alone is a new experience, but I'm learning.