Albania - Day 4, Gjirokaster, border crossing

 So on this day, we started our day of long driving back North (which is why I said I would have changed how I did things had I known ahead of time where we were going to go). So we drove from our Airbnb in Sarande to a town called Gjirokaster.

We parked the car and walked to the Zekate House. The house was built in 1811–1812 by Beqir Zeko, a local Albanian general administrator in Ali Pasha's government. It is described as "one of the grandest examples of Gjirokastër architecture in the Ottoman style", and as the authentic southern Albanian Tosk type residential housing of the early 19th century wealthy Albanians.

Fortified tower houses, (known as kullë in Albanian), belonged to wealthy people, such as government officials or merchants. All rooms have a basic design: a safe ground floor with a wooden gallery on top, which are the most important rooms for an extended family (you can stick your kids up there and they're not underfoot). The decks are placed on the walls to help defend against the enemies they attack.

It was super cool.

Then we meandered through town a bit to the Castle of Gjirokaster.

The castle was huge and had lots of cannons.

We went up on top for great views, and there was this WWII crashed plane.

Then we paid a tiny amount to go into this tiny little "museum" which was in a tunnel and was really more like an antique shop. But it was cool.

Then we got back to where our car was and realized the back tire was totally flat. So Brett and Talmage pumped it while I called the rental place and he told us where to go to have the tire fixed. It was only about 5 minutes away and he quickly fixed it so we were quickly on our way again.

We spent more than an hour waiting in line at the Montenegro border, but we got through. We drove to Bar in Montenegro, and we decided on a restaurant to eat at. It overlooked the Old Town, which was cool, fortressy-looking up on a hill, but the sun went down and it was getting kind of cold, and by the time we were finished eating it was way too dark and late to go explore it. So we never got to. But Brett's steak kabobs were so good and I was so jealous that I hadn't ordered them, even though mine was good too, but Ethne didn't love her sausages (even though they were a very typical dish for the area) and we all laughed because it was a huge serving. Also, she had a bug in her food, so then they took it away and gave us some free dessert and drinks or something. That was also funny because at a different restaurant another night she had found a bug in her food.