Tirana, Albania

Neither of us slept very well, I think cause we were afraid of sleeping in. We had planned an early departure, hoping to complete the six-hour drive to Tirana during daylight.

We finally woke up around 7am, and left the Airbnb just before 8am. The nearest taxi stand was a seven minute walk; Heather flagged down an empty taxi passing by almost immediately.

Got dropped off at Gruz Port, where we had parked our car. There was a hotel across the street that was serving breakfast, so we had a quick bite, using up our remaining kuna.

Paid for parking at the machine (I still don’t know how the prepaid parking works that I bought on the web), and we were on the road by about 8:45am.

We drove along the coast most of the way, mostly retracing our route. Got some good pics of Dubrovnik at sunrise.

Instead of driving all the way around the Bay of Kotor, we took the ferry across the narrow mouth for 4.50 EUR. It also gave me time to relax from driving.

There was no lineup to cross the border to Montenegro. Got both an exit stamp from Croatia and an entry stamp to Montenegro!

We bypassed Bar, and then to the border of Albania. Here there was a huge lineup, which took us just over an hour to get through. No stamps at this border; in fact we haven’t yet had a stamp at all for Albania :(

We continued south to Tirana. It got busier about 10km from the centre; including a couple of very busy roundabouts. (At this point we decided to not try to drive to the Skanderbeu Museum tomorrow, about 45 minutes out; I was done with driving).

We reached our hotel, near the hip Blloku area of town. Parking was just across the street in a secure lot, one of the easier parking locations for this trip.

Checking in was very fast and efficient, the opposite of our experience with our Airbnb host in Dubrovnik. The receptionist gave us the spiel as he carried our bags to our room, basically said here’s your room and then left. I wish all checkins were like this :)

We were tired, hungry and thirsty from the drive. Plus the sun was in our faces most on the time and we had headaches. I showered first and then went out to buy some water. Ended up at a bakery, where I also bought a cheese and tomato sandwich to split with Heather. It felt like the tastiest sandwich ever.

We had reservations tonight at Salt, a very trendy restaurant in Blloku. I think you need to book weeks in advance. We planned our trip in July so it was easy for us to get in.

Dinner was really good. Service was excellent. There’s restaurants like this in Toronto, we just can’t get into them :)

Walked home feeling better than when we first arrived. We fell asleep pretty quickly.