Montenegro - Day 5 - Sveti Stefan, Kotor Fortress, and Perast

I always think AFTER a trip that I should take pictures of our airbnbs but during the trip it doesn't seem near as interesting as all the other things I could take pictures of.  But here we are eating breakfast before heading out.

And here's a picture of Ethne while driving (although I think it's from a different day).

We stopped at a place for a walk that I legit do not know the name of because I honestly just happened to find a little thing on Google Maps that said 'nice walk' or something, so we stopped in there and did the walk. And it was nice! :) AHA!--I just found it!! I remembered we passed a hotel named Hotel Danica (I actually took a picture to show my niece Danica but had since deleted the picture), and so now I can tell you it was in Petrovac, Montenegro, and the walk was called  Hiking trail "Reževići".

And it overlooked Kastio Castle. And it was suuuuuch beautiful water!!

And it went along the water, and then it went in a tunnel.

Until we came out at this abandoned hotel construction. Talmage thought about buying it. 

Then we traveled on.

We got to Sveti Stefan and we parked up on the road, and walked down the maze of stairs through all the houses.

And we got to the beach of the Villa Miločer --a luxury beachside stone-walled resort overlooking Aman Sveti Stefan, on the banks of the Adriatic Sea.

We kept walking down the beach for a ways.

And got to this place where the rock juts up over the water (which I had found through instagram, which leads me to say that there is actually almost TOO much information to be had when it comes to traveling these days. I feel like I need to research every possible option so that we can see the best things and do the coolest things, etc etc, but with five billion blogs, and instagram, and just google maps itself having lots of information, it's so much OVERLOAD! It can actually be overwhelming. And yet I still do it (although at some point you just have to say, okay that's all), and in the end it is worth it.) and took a few pictures. (We should have had a flowing skirt or something though.)

Then we continued on to Kotor. The driving was a little stressful because it was really busy and crowded on these tiny little streets.

But we finally made it, and found a place to park, and walked to the Kotor fortress. 

Now in my research, I had read that it gets quite crowded because the cruise ships come in and so there are swarms of people that get off of them and come in. But I didn't really realize that the fortress is, like, enclosed. So it really really does feel crowded. There were a lot of people. We walked around but we didn't stay super long. It was cool though. Lots of cool buildings and towers and churches.

This is more of the fortress that goes up the side of the mountain, and I had thought about hiking up, but we didn't feel like it actually.

Instead, we went out and drove to where our airbnb (except this one wasn't through airbnb, I think it was through hotels.com or something?) was for the night, in Perast, and it was a GREAT spot! Look at the view!!! So amazing!

We had this little veranda with a canopy of grapes. And the blue water in the back. Sheesh! I'm done.

These two were so cute. It was so fun to be with them.

We were laughing because we said this one, holding hands, looked like a wedding invitation picture.

Awww, my fave!

Then we just walked down through the little tight alleyways and stairs down to Perast. Perast > Kotor. So lovely. So idyllic. So uncrowded. :)

We found a little tour boat to take us out to Our Lady of the Rocks Island.

Such a pretty little church with it's blue dome. :) 

We went back to the shore, and wandered around some more.

We stopped at one concrete beach (there aren't real beaches, just some places where there are steps that go down into the water), and Brett flew his drone for a while, and let Talmage take a turn. And Brett swam. 

Brett tried and tried to get Talmage to go in, but he never actually did. It was pretty cold.

We watched a cruise ship pull out of the Kotor port and chug away.

It was so tranquil and quiet and the sun was glowing down it's buttery golden light.  Ahhh.

We had dinner and then walked the few staircases back up to our hotel.

Here are some drone stills.

Oh, and something cool is that for Christmas we got a big book called Travel that has information and pictures about 200 countries in it. On the Montenegro page, it had three pictures, two of which places we went to!! Kotor, almost exactly like the picture we took as we were driving down to it, and Sveti Stefan from a drone shot.