Bells and Whistles: We went to Albania!! Sept 2024

Ethne, Talmage, Brett, and I went to Albania and Montenegro!! It was fantastic!

So, when we took Jethro and Hazel to Iceland I had said that I wanted to do that, a kind of individual trip with kids (but not actually individual - 2 at a time) when they were youngerish teenagers. So then Ethne was like, "when are Talmage and I getting our trip?" and I said, "You went to Peru." And she said, "EVERYONE went to Peru." Which is true... but I still wasn't 100% convinced I was going to give them a separate trip. But then Ethne decided to go with the German class from high school on their trip to Switzerland and Germany, and when she showed us her itinerary, and I was reading through it, I was getting soooo excited for the awesome places she would get to see (many of them were places we had were familiar with or had gone to, like Bern, the Swiss temple, etc.) and I basically was just jealous of her exciting trip. So then I just determined that when I next saw a really good deal for a flight come up near one of the places I would really like to go, I was just going to book it! I had money saved up from plasma, and I just never really pulled the trigger, so I decided I would, and take Ethne and Talmage.

So then pretty soon after, I saw a deal come up to Nice, France. One place that I had read about that I thought would be really cool to go to is a French island very near Nice called Corsica. So I thought, that was on my list! So I talked to Brett and booked tickets! However, then once I had the tickets to get us to Nice (fairly cheaply), I got conflicted because I would have to make another flight to Corsica, but I COUUULD get another flight to pretty much anywhere in the vicinity of Europe, because those super cheap airlines are available once you're already in Europe... so that was then overwhelming, because the POSSIBILITIES! I could go to Norway almost as cheaply as Corsica. I thought about too many places, but finally I decided on Albania/Montenegro. (Honestly, I'm sure we would have had a great time in Corsica, but I thought it would be cool to have two more countries on my visited list.)

Then for a while I harassed Talmage and Ethne and wouldn't tell them where we were going. I did give in and tell them after a while.

So, it was some good travel time. We flew from SLC to somewhere (can't remember where our stop was), to Nice, where we just waited for many hours. I think we got in earlyish, like 9 maybe, and our flight to Albania was at 1:45 on Wizz air (this was September 26). We thought about going out and walking around Nice, but we'd have to find a way to store our luggage, or take it with us, and maybe change money to pay for an uber or something, and kind of the last straw was that it was raining. So we just opted to hang out at the airport. Not the nicest airport in the world, but it worked.

So we flew to Tirana (this was probably something I would have done differently if I could go back. I think I would have flown into Corfu if it were a similar price, because I could have made a better straight shot, without wasting time circling back) and picked up our rental car and drove to Durrës. This was just a pretty close by stop because I figured we'd be very tired after flying all night and would want to crash early. This was also the worst of our airbnbs for the whole trip, as far as being in a trashy area. Not scary, just not inspiring at all for our first glimpse of Albania. We went to a store and got some breakfast cereal and some sandwich fixings (I think? I would imagine we did, haha) and we went out to eat at a restaurant that was also less than impressive.

View from our window. And good thing Brett is a great car-parker, because it was tight back in the alley we were in.

So the next morning we got in the car so that we could get to Vlorë to meet up with our boat tour for the day. This was a full-day tour (about 8 hours, which didn't seem overlong at all) of the Karaburun Peninsula. We would visit all the caves and coves and little bays and beaches along the way. We went to Haxhi Ali Cave, Dafina Bay, Dafina Cave, Gjiri i Brisanit, Kanioni i Skafistave, Gjiri i Inglezit, Gjiri i Nezhajve, and Grama Bay. --most of those names don't mean anything to me, because I didn't remember which place was named what. But we'd have 5 or 10 minutes on the boat between some of them, sometimes 20 or 40, and then back.

The view of Vlore, from the speedboat.

And already I'm drunk on the blue. I love it so much.

This was the Haxhi Ali Cave our first stop, and we took a dip in the amazing blue water.

See the fish by Talmage? How is it that we live in a world that truly contains these magical blue places???

That's me floating!

Ethne did not jump in yet. ha

We had perfect sunny, blue-sky days. Oh, the bliss.

Look at that little rainbow! And that beautiful spray!

Dafina Cave, I presume? Either way, the turquoise color slays me.

We got dropped off at a beach like this to have an hour or so to swim, but then the boat came back after checking out the next place, and he said he was going to give us our longer break at the other beach because this one was very windy that day. He said it was very untypical, because normally it's the other beach that's windy and this one was calm. I loved all the beaches, so it was great.

The water was absolutely crystal clear, which you can't tell so much from the still pictures, which reminds me that Brett brought his drone and took video and they are incredible! So I'll have to take some screenshots from them and post them too. It really is different to have the above perspective.

We did some snorkeling, but there weren't too many fish. Still cool though. We did find one anemone shell to take home.

This was the clear winner of coolest spot we visited. I don't know which is the right technical name for it, but it is called the Blue Gem Cave tour. Anyway, you had to walk through and duck under this little spot here,

And then it opens up into this big room, lighted up in this AMAZING way from the little crack of spot where the light comes through. We could swim under that crack out to the open bay too, which I did a couple of times. It was just soooooooooo cool!!!

Then someone was telling Brett to do a backflip off the boat (maybe it was even me, I don't remember), and so the guide that was driving our boat came over and told Brett he would help him, and Brett did it! (But he didn't need help, the guide was just trying to give him enough spin to have him go all the way around.) And then the guide swam out and climbed up the cliffside of the bay, and did a cool dive. And then when he came back to the boat, Ethne was getting ready to backflip, because I told her if she did one I would do one, and he said, "Oh, is she doing a backflip too?" and I said yes, and he smiled and said, "Oh, I inspirate my clients!" haha And then I swam over and climbed up the cliffside kind of where he had, but not quite as high and jumped in. It was good times.

Then we went back on the boat and went to another little beach cove. There was a hike there that took you up over to see it from above, so we quickly did that. It really was beautiful.