Day 29 - Friday 10th June

It was yet another magic start to the day in Dubrovnik - having breakfast on the terrace of our hotel on a warm sunny day overlooking the brilliantly blue Adriatic, the island of Lukrom, the old town of Dubrovnik and a large cruise ship anchored offshore. As usual here, the service and food for breakfast was exceptional.

This a fabulous hotel in an idyllic location. It's about as close to perfect as you could ever hope for. Why would anyone ever leave? The only problem was that we were due to fly out this afternoon.

This morning we decided to go for a swim at a beach just a short distance along the coast from our hotel. When we asked the hotel reception for directions, they forewarned us that there were more than 200 steps down to the beach.

On the way there, we made things harder for ourselves by going down the wrong set of stairs down the cliff face and having to come back up again. The stairs we needed were about 200m further on past a small church. The view from both sets of stairs was spectacular. "Spectacular" is just about the only type of view that they do in this corner of the world.

The beach was a mixture of sand, pebble and stones - so it was better than the pebble beaches we've seen in some other places on our travels. The water was warm and salty.

Because we had to check out of the hotel by 12 noon, we knew we only had an hour at the beach and had planned to leave by 11am. After chatting to a young American man on the beach for a while - the only other person on the beach apart from staff at the beach cafe and some workmen building a bar on the beach - Suzy looked at her phone to check the time and was alarmed to find that it said 11:50am. We couldn't figure out how this could be right. Eventually we concluded that the phone must be picking up the wrong time zone from a nearby country.

We managed to shower, change and check out of our hotel by noon. They agreed to store our bags for us until we had to leave for the airport. Suzy went down to the hotel pool while I went back to the centre of town to catch the cable car to the top of the mountain overlooking Dubrovnik.

The views from the platform at the top of the cable car are . . . well, er, spectacular. A great opportunity to take more photos. Up there I got chatting to an Australian couple from Melbourne. It turned out they'd a problem recently in Spain with pickpockets too. In their case, someone slashed the tyres of their hire car and then stole her handbag. Another couple overhead our conversation and told us the story where her handbag was stolen after withdrawing money from an ATM.

After going back down the cable car, I took more photos of the walls of the ancient town from a different perspective and then walked back to our hotel.

I was worried that the scheduled pickup time of 3:30pm to go to the airport might be rushing things too much as so we rang Florio to ask to make it earlier. He didn't think there was a problem but said he would come at 3:15pm instead.

Just as he arrived we heard an ambulance siren. We were held up by a traffic jam as we went down the hill and I started to wonder if we should have left even earlier. However, we saw the ambulance drive off after a while and we got to the airport in plenty of time. At the check-in, there was a long queue for the flight to Paris but there was no queue for our flight to London.

The plane left on time at 5:30pm and most seats were taken. There must have been favourable winds because it landed ten minutes early.

We'd booked a car to take us from Stansted airport to our B&B at Golders Green and so we'd expected to find someone standing at the exit holding a sign with my name on it but there was nobody there. After ten minutes I rang the car company and, after waiting on hold for a while, was told that the car had been held up and wouldn't be there for a further 20 minutes.

We cancelled the car and decided to catch the National Express bus instead. We found a machine to buy the bus tickets and were pleased to find out that there was a bus leaving at 8pm - in only 10 minutes time. The fare was only 16 pounds compared with 55 pounds for the car service.

The next challenge was to find the pickup location for the bus. As we searched, I received a phone call from a supervisor from the car company apologising for the car not turning up. He gave me a few feeble excuses but I told him it was too late because we'd already decided to get a bus instead.

When we found the bus area, they reminded us that the Golders Green depot is being rebuilt and they would drop us at one location and provide a shuttle service to Golders Green. When we reached the drop-off location, we got conflicting advice about where the shuttle bus went from. By this time, it had started to rain and so we hailed a taxi instead. It turned out to be only a few km to get to our B&B.

When we arrived at our B&B, Jackie said we looked exhausted. It was good to be back at our home away from home.