Groundhog Day in Sarandë

In case anyone is wondering, we’re still in Sarandë. I'm not sure if I mentioned it earlier, but we're here for eight nights. Because of the weather, it's curtailed any afternoon activity other than local grocery shopping. It's just too damn hot to go very far on foot in the afternoons. We haven't even gone to the beach after lunchtime due to the heat.

This is all fine with us, but it does make for a slightly Groundhog Day kind of blog. It can't be helped—it’s just the reality of being here. I did consider not posting every day, and that might become an option, but for now I'm just posting brief updates of what our day involved.

Remember, this travel journal is primarily for Sarah and I to look back on and remind ourselves of what we got up to and where we went. The fact that we’ve brought others along for the virtual ride is just a lovely bonus—to share the experience. That includes sharing the boring bits. 😂

If you remember back to the very early posts, the reason we’re hanging around in Albania is to stretch out our time in Europe. We're restricted by the Schengen days available, so we have to stay outside the Schengen area to make our time in Europe last. Otherwise, we would need to fly home by early to mid-September, which was never the plan. You only get 90 days in the Schengen Area within a 180-day period.

The original plan had been to head to Romania next week, which is a Schengen country, and then into Turkey for the rest of August (Turkey is not Schengen). But we decided back in Croatia that we simply couldn't survive the heat of Turkey in August. Yes, we probably could have figured that out before we got here, but some things become more obvious once you're on the ground.

It turns out it was a good idea to dodge Turkey, as it's currently experiencing terrible wildfires—the worst of which are in areas we had planned to visit. We do hope to visit some of those areas at a later date, but for now it’s a watch-and-review situation. We certainly won’t be going there in August. We have 67 Schengen days still up our sleeves and will start consuming them again from the 1st of August. If we stay in the Schengen from that date onwards we will need to leave Europe before the 5th of October. Turkey is still an option to extend the time though but it's an evolving plan.

Okay, with that reminder out of the way, back to Groundhog Day. A slight variation today, though—I managed to snooze until after 6:30 am! Once Sarah was up and breakfast was out of the way, we both headed out for a morning walk. It was 8:30 am by the time we set off up the street. She asked me what the hurry was and if I was going to chill and take in my surroundings. I had to remind her this was just the speed I walk at. In fact, it was already pegged back to 90% of my usual pace—but I took the hint and eased it back a further notch.

We took a slightly different route towards the seafront promenade, as we wanted to see if the local buses were running from the town square. There were a couple of specific buses we were interested in seeing, but neither of them was there. I think you either strike it lucky at their ad-hoc departure times or sit and wait for 40 minutes. Anyway, there was no sign of them, so we’ll try again tomorrow at a different time.

We carried on to the promenade and followed it to the far end of the bay, where we visited two days ago. I should mention it’s cooler today—still going to be warm, but at least the high is forecast at 28°C instead of 34°C. It was only 26°C when we set off. We turned around and retraced our steps along the promenade before ducking back up to see if the buses had magically appeared. Nope—still not there.

We were quite warm by the time we got home.  After a short rest and a nice cool glass of water, it was beach time. The sea today was quite rough. The cooler day may be because the wind direction has changed, pushing bigger waves onto our beach. The water was slightly warmer though, and once we negotiated the waves pounding the stones in the shallows, it was still a pleasant swim. It just wasn’t as easy to see the bottom, and while treading water, you needed to keep an eye out every so often so the swells didn’t swamp you by surprise.

Given we were out later than usual, we didn’t stay quite as long. Even though the temperature is cooler, the sun still burns you here, and we only had on minimal sun protection. After our swim we decided to grab a shopping bag and head up the small hill that is our street to the bakery and butcher. This has become another part of the Groundhog Day routine: fresh bread for lunch and something from the butcher for dinner. Today we saw they had sausages, which we hadn't seen there before. We only needed one, as they’re about 40 cm long—enough to feed us both. Our friendly young butcher suggested adding yoghurt and a little mustard. We have yoghurt, but no mustard—so we might need to improvise.

We weren't back at base long before it was time to enjoy the nice fresh bread with tomatoes and cheese for lunch.

The afternoon involved more reading and a game of Five Crowns—which I won! I'm pegging things back slowly. It’s now 6–4 to Sarah.

The sausages for dinner were really nice—slightly spicy but not hot. We didn’t need yoghurt with them. Boiled new potatoes, capsicum, and a slice of tasty bread rounded out the meal.