Plans

Saturday morning we're driving to Dubrovnik.  It is 180 miles and we've been told it takes about seven hours if we only get lost once or twice.  Albanian highways don't have numbers, or at least if they do, they're not posted anywhere I've seen.  The best I think we can hope for is an arrow pointing to a town we're headed to.

After we get into Montenegro maybe things will improve -- they have highway numbers listed on the map, as does Croatia.  Hopefully they'll be posted.  

We've also been told that when in doubt and choosing between two roads that look like the main road, take a left.  That way we'll be heading toward the Adriatic and not Romania.  Since there aren't highway route numbers to follow, our directions contain info such as "after you pass the castle on the hill in Shkodra, take a left at the next big road."  Our "main-highway" route has only one one-lane bridge and only one ferry.  But I'm assuming since everyone else can get there we can too.

I'm canning my first batch of tomatoes today.  They're not turning out too good -- too much water.  I don't know why, because I've eaten this kind before and they were real meaty.  I'm going to have about 15 quarts of two-day marinara sauce, or lots of soup stock.  I've already cooked the juice down some.   Nancey's dad knew more about tomatoes than anyone I've ever known, and in June Mr. Turnage always started worrying that there would be a  big rain and ruin his tomato crop.  The ripening tomatoes would suck all that water up and the skins would split.  Which is what mine looked like, and we did have a lot of rain up until about a week ago.  So maybe my next batch will be better.

As soon as my pickling stuff gets here I'm going to make pickles.  It was difficult in Jackson to find cucumbers small enough for good pickles, but here there are a lot of them.  And I've seen the first baby okra in the market.  So I'll be putting up vegetables through the summer