Winters in Seattle are famously dark, wet and gloomy.
And yet... there come half-a-dozen or so days each winter so
crystalline, sparkling clear, it is like mother nature is doing her
best to make it all up to you.
After a mostly cold and rainy week in Rome, and an overnight ferry ride
from Bari, Italy, I arrived back in Croatia at the dawn of one of those
picture-perfect winter days.
After checking through immigration and customs in Dubrovnik,
I re-boarded the ferry, and savored Croatia's own
inland passage up the coast to the island of Korčula, and its eponymous
main town. Dubrovnik's
day will come soon.
Since that day of
arrival, it has been mostly overcast here, with some days of howling
windy rain; the kind of wind that transforms your umbrella from a
protection against the weather into one more thing that needs
protection. This is not as bad as it sounds; I picked up a sniffle, and
I've been sleeping a lot to combat it. I.e. I haven't been
out that all much anyway.
Tonight the sky is star-studded.
If it holds out through tomorrow, I'll have another gorgeous (though
probably cold) day.
Korčula town was
settled by the ancient Greeks, and reached it's heyday
as part of the Venetian empire.
The old town covers a small teardrop-shaped peninsula connected
to the rest of the island at is south end by a short isthmus. The
teardrop and adjacent "mainland" (of the island) both look gloriously
Venetian. The
city claims to be Marco Polo's birthplace. There is, at least,
no
record of him being born anywhere else. There is an old island family
called DePolo, and Venice did recruit sea captains from their Adriatic
colonies.
I saw what I took for the biggest bumblebee I ever saw, flitting around
from blossom to blossom on a lilac-colored flowering bush the name of
which I
do not know. That bee must have been as long as my thumb. Then it
registered. Not bee - bird! A hummingbird - beaktip to
tailtip, as long as my thumb if that. It took me half a dozen
tries to get a useful photo of the little guy. Here he is at full
resolution. Not textbook quality, but the best I could do.
Later
A friend has identified my little flitting critter as a hummingbird hawk moth, (which does seem to cover a lot of bases).
Contents Copyright 2012 Jeff Bulf