My experience living in Montenegro is that sometimes things don’t work.  We got off the ship and the van I booked to take all nine of us to the Lovćen cable car was not waiting.  I texted and called.  It was stuck in traffic behind an accident.  Stuck in traffic was completely believable with four cruise ships arriving at the same time unloading people and loading tours.  Marko told us to walk uphill to the bus station.  To walk to the bus, I had to use the underpass that Kotor put under the main highway between the city wall and the cruise terminal.  It prevents people from getting hit by cars but none of the four escalators were working so I had to trudge up and down stairs.  Did I mention that I am not overly fond of stairs?

We got to the bus station and the van was still stuck in traffic so we waited for the normal bus to the cable car.  Once we got on it was slow going to the Cable Car terminal.  The 1600 meter long tunnel (A little over a mile) was bumper to bumper.  But at least there were no cows.  Our experience was that cows came into the tunnel to escape the heat.  There was heat, but no cows.  When we got to the cable car we couldn’t get on because computer that scanned the tickets was down and the system needed rebooting.  In some essential ways Montenegro hasn’t changed.

We rode the cable car to the top of one of Lovćen’s peaks, lower than Njegoš’s resting place or the TV towers, but I was able to point them out to my grandkids, who probably were not interested in broadcast antennae.  

They found an imaginative playground while Suzi and I sat on a terrace overlooking Kotor and the whole Boka drinking a coffee. It was a pleasant sit, being about 11 degrees cooler at the top than in Kotor at sea level.  I wanted to buy some Vranac wine but a bottle that we could have gotten for about 85 euro cents back 25 years ago was now €56.  The wine has been discovered.

The complex at the top of the mountain and end of the cable car was well done with a restaurant, café, playground, roller coaster that ran along the mountain ridges and frozen bananas. 

I love driving the back roads in this part of Montenegro.  The stone houses and stone walls are made of the same rock that is scattered across the landscape.  They almost look like they grew from the ground.  This time we flew over the landscape in the cable car.

The drive back did not take as long as I had feared because the driver took us up and over the old road rather than through the tunnel.  This is another road that Suzi and knew well and were happy to see again. 

In the old town we had lunch in the main square inside the walls and then split up.  Shannon went looking for the cat museum and cat shop.  Suzi and I took off through the narrow streets past the square with “The Old Black Poplar Tree” planted in 1667, (I marvel at a living thing more than 350 years old) to visit St. Tryphon (Sveti Tripun in Montenegrin) Cathedral within the city walls. 

The Saint was protector of the city.  The first church honoring him was built in Kotor in 809 before the great schism.  There are a lot of churches inside the walls, both Orthodox and Catholic.  This one is Catholic.  Construction of this Romanesque edition of the church was started in 1166, long before the current venetian walls were built.  It has been rebuilt twice after earthquakes, the most recent in 1979.