Dubrovnik Croatia was on our short list of MUST SEE cities. As a Game of Thrones fan, I was interested in seeing the filming location for my all time favorite show. None of us had any idea how much we would love it.
One way I would save a lot of money on traveling in Europe was to make a list of all the places I wanted to see-- nothing elaborate, just used the NotePad on my iPhone. When I had a general idea of the dates we could travel, I would search Easy Jet and Ryan Air (among others) for airfares. I would search from Stuttgart, Baden-Baden, Memmingen, Basel and Frankfurt. All of the airports were within 2 hours by car or train and offered different routes to places we wanted to go.
While searching for flights over Independence Weekend (2018), I came across super cheap airfare from Basel to Dubrovnik-- only €74.99 per person for a round trip ticket. Needless to say we jumped on that quick. We informed our family friends, the Stampfly's, and they grabbed five tickets for themselves. Since we had a party of nine, we looked on AirBnB and Booking.com and found a charming apartment just outside of the Old Town for under €800-- less than €100 per person for four days.
From the garden of the AirBnB
Getting to the AirBnB from the Airport was our next task and we decided it would be cheaper to hire a car service. We only needed a car to get to and from the Airport and we would walk everywhere else. I looked at the car services on the Easy Jet app, but reached out to the AirBnB host just in case and she ended up saving us a ton of money, almost €100.
After walking the wall, we headed across Dubrovnik Bay and up the stairs to Lovrijenac Tower. It's worth noting that we could've purchased tickets to the tower when we bought out tickets to tour the wall-- but we did not. Therefore, we didn't actually go into the tower, but did manage to see some breathtaking views.
Afterwards, we headed into Old Town to walk around and grab some dinner.
After we ate a fabulous dinner, we continued to walk the town and ended up speaking to a woman who offered us a boat tour the following day-- to see the Blue Cave and take us to the beach. I don't remember the exact cost, but I belive for 9 passengers, it was just under €200.
Our boat wasn't really what we expected, but our captain was very helpful and took us everywhere we wanted to go. We only paid for four hours and used up every.single.minute on our tour.
We aimed to see the Lover's Cove, but ended up on the wrong side of the island. We spent a good hour of our allotted boat time trekking over the hill to find the cover, only to realize it was far to dangerous for us to hike down the hill.
Later we headed to the Blue Cave and swam into the cave from the bay. If only I had my GoPro at the time-- I would have had some great film. As you can see though, the ocean is as blue as I've ever seen.
On Day 3, we all decided to go back to Old Town. There were some more filming locations I read about and I wanted to explore other areas of the city. We stopped and had lunch at the bottom of the baroque staircase from the Sept of Baelor in the Game of Thrones. After lunch, we walked around Porporela and took in the spectacular views of the bright blue water and Lokrum Island. It was, overall, a very relaxing day and the city was getting prepared for the Football Match between Croatia and Switzerland that evening.
Day 4 arrived and we walked from our AirBnB to the gondola for a ride up to Fort Imperial. It offers an unbelievable view of the coast line and, if you chose to believe, a view of the Bosnia and Herzegovina land border.
A few from Fort Imperial
Day 5 was preparing for our trip home. Our host was kind enough to let us keep our bags at their place since our flight did not leave until the late afternoon. We all headed back into Old Town to have lunch, and ice cream, and pick up some last minute souvenirs. Our trip home wasn't without issue though. The flight was cancelled, but EasyJet was kind enough to put everyone up in a hotel, which offered a free breakfast, and caddied us back to the airport first thing in the morning.
Add Dubrovnik and Croatia to the TOP of your travel bucket list!