Hello World
One of the few advantages of getting older is you have time to do things you always wanted to do. For me, that means planes, trains, automobiles, and cruise ships.
By Charles Jeffries
The author and his granddaughter on the island of Vis and some other places he’s been. Ho Chi Minh City, Istanbul, Paris, Geneva.
I stumbled across a beach bar in Croatia last summer, and I’ll never forget it. Not because it was a great bar; it wasn’t. It was a concrete slab cut into the side of a cliff 40 feet or so above the Adriatic Sea just outside the incredible stone wall that once protected Old Town Dubrovnik from would-be conquerors. The bar has no walls, is covered by a bamboo roof, and has a stone counter from which you can order fine Croatian beers like Karlovačkoor and Ožujsko, but not much else.
The Buza Bar has no tables or bar stools because no one goes there to sit. If you are so inclined there are some plastic milk crates you can flip over and “relax” on. The Buza Bar’s only nod to luxury—or comfort of any kind—is some well-worn patio furniture cushions that you can put on the top of the crate before you sit down.
The cliffs below the bar jut out above the sea and afford sunbathers a place to spread out a towel and tend to their tans. At other points in the cliffs are flat spots from which you can jump from 20, 30, 40 feet and splash down into the warm Adriatic. This is why people come to the Buza Bar.
In my 30s and 40s I was able to travel a fair amount of the world by myself or with my family. As my kids graduated college and established their own careers with their own disposable incomes (meaning they could now afford to pay their own way), many more opportunities around world opened up for us from a financial perspective.
Now my grandkids are travel companions, as well, and that’s why a nondescript beach bar in Dubrovnik has become one of my favorite spots in the world. Me, my daughter, and my 3-year-old granddaughter climbed down the steep steps from the bar to sea level, jumped into the Adriatic Sea and there we were, three generations swimming in the thick saltwater 4,500 miles from our homes in different cities on the East Coast of the United States.
It was a very cool moment. On various trips these three generations have gazed at the Eifel Tower; cruised Lac Léman, stumbled across a small zoo in Lyon (to the delight of my granddaughter), dined along the Rhone River and enjoyed many priceless moments, including the many in Croatia this summer, along the way.
Just the fact that I was in Croatia was fascinating to me. When I was a young professional Croatia didn’t even exist. It was part of Yugoslavia. I couldn’t even think about traveling there, or to many other countries I’ve been to—the Czech Republic and Slovakia also didn’t exist but they are now awesome adventures. Hungary was behind the Iron Curtain, but I’ve now enjoyed the goulash and local cuisine and wine. Back then, I don’t think you could even book a commercial flight to Vietnam and China but now I’ve toured and played golf in both.
Much of the world was out of bounds for American travelers until recently. And even the countries that were open were expensive to get to. These were the days before discount airlines and air travel was for businessmen and the wealthy.
Now, as my kids are young professionals, I wonder what might change for them in 30 years. Will they be able to vacation in Baghdad, Kiev, or Pyongyang? Or will much of the world be shut off again? It could go either way.
For me, I plan to continue to check off new countries to visit as long as I am able. There are many more disagreeable things about getting older than there are agreeable things, but I’ve found the two most important are grandkids and the freedom to travel. The ability to combine the two creates indelible moments that I expect to last the rest of my life.
