It didn’t take long to get another country stamp on my passport after Dubrovnik; Montenegro wasn’t far south from there. The Omicron Covid variant was spreading and Montenegro had just imposed a new requirement to enter the country: you must have been vaccinated within the past 6 months. Luckily I was just a few days ahead of that deadline for my second vax.
I was happy that I decided to keep riding even though the weather was in the 40s and rainy still. My first stop was in Kotor and then a short ride ahead of that my second stop was Budva. I decided to stay in Budva for 5 days because of the relentless rain. I stayed in the old town, which had a good coffee shop called North Coffee. Shefak, the barista, was from Turkey and he gave me some tips on where I could stay while in Istanbul.
Old Town Budva felt a lot like Split – a skeleton of itself during high season. There weren’t many restaurants open and the ones that were open were overpriced.
I told my friend Carole about my plan to ride to Istanbul and she was interested in meeting up with me at the end there because she had always wanted to go to Haggia Sophia and Nicea. So did I. So we agreed to meet up there in January. It was nice to have something like that to look forward to.