You now have to upload a picture to a post to save it to your profile, or at least I do because it's the only way I can figure out. This is me on the roof of the Continental Park Hotel with the Hagia Sophia in the background.

O, Dubrovnik. The pearl of the Adriatic, the gem of the bar trip. I don't know if I can do it justice, but I'll give it a shot.

Dubrovnik is cool for several reasons. Most notably, it's a very well-preserved 16th-century walled city unlike any other. This means you can get up on the walls of the city and walk the mile and a half length of them in 90 minutes, with amazing views of the city and the sea. It also means you can get lost in the alleys and avenues of the town.

Additionally, there's a nice peninsula just north of the walled city where most people (including us) stay, with terrific restaurants and a couple of decent beaches. Unlike the tiny room in Split, we had two full bedrooms with a double and two twins respectively, a big kitchen, a big living room, air-conditioning, and a patio where you could reach up overhead and pluck grapes from the overhanging vines.

Dubrovnik is also one of the jumping off points for many of Croatia's popular island destinations. We didn't go to any of the big ones but did do a half-day cruise to the 3 Elephiti Islands just off the coast. The first two were kinda lame 40-minute stops, and we were afraid that the highlight was going to be watching the boat crew member throw our lunch fish remains to seagulls off the back of the boat. But then we got to the third island of Lopud, which was supposed to be the good one, and where we had 2.5 hours.

When you approach Lopud, you quickly fear that you have been taken by inaccurate brochures, because instead of a beautiful sandy beach you simply get an ok mostly concrete beach near the port. But then you follow the signs to the sandy beach--literally up a small mountain and back down again--and you come to an incredible natural cove with incredibly blue water and an impeccable sandy beach. Lopud did not disappoint.

All of this, plus a very cool outdoor Internet park, was very cool, but I've left the singular highlight of Dubrovnik for last. A friend had told me about a hole in the city wall where you could walk halfway down a hill to a beer and ice cream vendor, and then go to the bottom of the hill and jump into the sea. Well, in the four years since he'd been there the vendor was replaced by a full service bar, but the bar seating still only went part of the way down.

As we descended the stairs, we found that we were the only people who had ventured past the bar area at that time. In that cool early evening about an hour before sunset, the four of us just sat quietly for a while, talking a little, two of us drinking beers, and all of us staring for a long time into the nearby sea.

Eventually I just said, "it was really hard to get here, and it makes it all the more worthwhile." At first I meant finding the little nook and getting down there, but when someone asked me what I meant, I realized I'd said so much more. It's hard to get to that spot, but it's also hard to get to Dubrovnik--there's no train service, bus service is just ok, and there are few flights. But it was also hard to get through law school. And to get to law school. Etc. etc. etc. Without getting too melodramatic, you could simply look to the earliest 2002 and 2003 sections of this blog's archives to find out just how hard it was to get there.

And that's a big part of why Dubrovnik was my favorite stop, and sitting on those rocks nursing an Ozujsko was one of my three favorite moments of the trip.

The other two will be covered later...

After giving some more thought to the trip-reporting plan, I realized that part of the problem was that we went to four cities in the first five days, and that's why that part was kind of a blur. Basically, we flew into Prague, and we really wanted to get to Croatia at some point in the trip. It turned out that thanks to Sky Europe, we had exactly one chance to do that--flying from Bratislava to Split on Day 4, and flying from Dubrovnik to Budapest on Day 8. So that's what we did. But after some flight delays (four excruciating hours sitting on the plane at JFK waiting for a runway--grrrr!!!!!), we ended up with an evening, a day, and a morning in Prague.

Prague was the beginning of two recurring trends on the trip--sampling numerous Eastern European beers, and walking all the hell over the place. We really enjoyed a couple of the Prague beers in particular; Staropramen was probably the collective favorite of everything we tried, and the completely unrelated European version of Budweiser was also quite nice. We saw all the major sites, and two of them involved hellacious climbs--the tower of the Charles Bridge and the 280-something-step spiral staircase of the St. Vitus Cathedral tower.

Those two climbs were part of perhaps my favorite recurring theme of the trip: doing things that I could not have physically done as recently as a year ago. I lost count, but there were probably at least a dozen such instances on the trip.

After Prague we took the train to Bratislava, which we got into about 5 p.m., and we were only there for that night, having a 9 a.m. flight in the morning. So there's not much to explain about Bratislava, except that it's the only place where we were hassled by Roma (ever culturally sensitive Raman teased them a bit and got flipped off for his troubles) and that we stayed in the apartment of some random couple someone found on the Internet. The guy was so nice that he even came back to drive us to the airport the next morning in his Skoda. We saw lots of iiiiiiinteresting Eastern European cars on the trip, but that was the only one we actually got to ride in.

From there we went to Split, Croatia. In Split we again stayed in private accommodations, but this time it was not so nice. This apartment had two tiny twin beds and two folded up cots when we got there, and we had no idea of how to get the cots to fit in the one room. For some reason we took the place, and somehow we got the cots folded down. This solved the question of whether we were going to stay one or two nights in Split, so we headed to Dubrovnik on the afternoon bus the next day.

But I should give Split its due--it's a crazy old city built in the remnants of Diocletian's circa 305 A.D. retirement palace. He lived there for about 10 years, then died, and then the place was abandoned for 500 years. At that point some locals wanted to avoid one of the invading hordes (I've forgotten which one), so they decided to move inside the palace walls, and there's been a city there ever since. Split also started something that would continue in Dubrovnik too--absolute awesome pizza.

So that was the first bit of the trip. I'll report on the other cities (and my new adventures in Venice) a bit later.

So, the rule for the future is: post or post not. There is no "planning to". Some form of trip synopsis will be forthcoming, but the ambitious town-by-town plan has been scuttled a bit because in all honesty when you go to 7 cities, it's kind of hard to remember the first 3 by the end.

Oh, and there's the slight matter that I'm taking off from Beallsville first thing tomorrow morning for the West Coast, via former regular commenter frank tanana's new gig in Oxford, Mississippi. I should be in Venice Beach sometime on Labor Day.

And, I'll be travelling in MY NEW CAR!!!

There's no way to truly do justice to a 19-day vacation in blow-by-blow style, especially when I didn't keep a diary, journal, or anything of the sort. But over the next couple of days I'm going to try to encapsulate as much as I can with a series of "5 quick stories about" posts for each city of the trip in order. No ground rules, except that I may expand "quick" as needed and that some general stories about the trip may be shoehorned into the places we didn't stay very long. So watch this space.

We've survived Prague, Bratislava, Split, Dubrovnik, and Budapest so far, and today we pulled into Varna (Жарна) on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. There is no water in Varna right now. I mean, there's the Black Sea and all, but there is no running water anywhere in the city. Fortunately, the Internet cafe is doing just fine, and everyone mysteriously seems to know that the water will be back on by 10 p.m., a mere hour away.

In the meantime, we take some solace in the fact that there's plenty of beer around. Boy howdy. Plus, we just had a two-course meal plus a half-liter of beer each, it was delicious, and the total bill with solid tip was 31 leva, which is about $25. Good times.

I can´t stress enough that you should all come to Dubrovnik. Right now. I´ll wait.

Also, Eastern European keyboards have 24 letters in the right place, but y and z are reversed and all the punctuation is in screwy places.

Budapest tomorrow; Varna, Bulgaria, on Tuesday, and generally more to come.

Tickets have been purchased today, so I am officially headed to Eastern Europe after all of this bar exam rigamarole is over. We're (4 of us total) flying into Prague on August 4th (leaving JFK on the 3rd) and flying out of Istanbul on the 22nd. The rest is, for the most part, TBD. Obviously, we're definitely spending a few days each in Prague and Istanbul. In between, Eastern Europe is our oyster--most likely we'll go from Prague to Budapest, and then we're still deciding whether to go down Croatia way or head to Romania and Bulgaria. Croatia is supposed to be awesome, but it's a tad out of the way unless we want to head over the Balkans through areas where there are unexploded land mines and people who haven't been told the war is over. Romania has Dracula tourism, Bulgaria has Black Sea beaches, and both are sure to have lots of ugly looking Warsaw Pact-Era buildings. Either way, it promises to be a memorable 2.5 weeks.

I think I could live in North Billerica, Massachusetts, forever if it were always May. If anyone ever hears about them cancelling winter in New England, please let me know and I'll act accordingly. I'm here visiting Tim (USC roommate, not Michigan roommate), but mostly I'm here to unwind. You see, I graduated on Saturday, and then I have to face another week at home starting on Monday and bar prep starting the following Wednesday. So 13 hours on the road yesterday and 11 more on Monday seemed like a small price to pay to find somewhere where I could hide from life for a little bit. Tim is very busy with school stuff this week (being both a teacher and an M.F.A. candidate), so I'm largely on my own.

So far so good. Despite not seeing any other bikes anywhere at all, the town is very bikeable and I put in about three miles going to the Post Office, Starbucks, lunch, and a little bit of exploring. I also spent several hours in Starbucks reading the first half of a book that I've been meaning to get around to for years. Now I'm back at Tim's fabulous new townhouse, on the deck overlooking the Concord River. I can hear a few birds, one distant lawnmower, and the natural river flow back here, and that's about it. In fact, I should wrap this up and get back to that shortly.

As I mentioned, I graduated on Saturday--hooray!! I still have some independent study obligations that will carry into the summer, but unlike most of my slacker classmates (I don't mean they're all slackers; I mean of the ones who are) it's not my fault because the work I'm supposed to be doing is just now becoming available. Other than that, the tests are done, the papers are in, and now I just have to pass the dreaded California bar.

But in the meantime, I'm off to Lexington and Concord tomorrow, and hopefully Newport and Pawtucket on Sunday, and a whole lot of relaxation in between.

Oh, and I should mention, finally, that it's been a good couple of weeks for the Wright men in generally--last Wednesday my brother became the junior planner for Lancaster County. I suspect that life among the Amish will never be the same again.