October 7, 2026

How Big is Your Umbrella?

Mokošica, Croatia

For the three days it was forecasted to rain cats and dogs — uhh, mostly cats — people in the streets and stairways of Mokošica had one umbrella each. The clouds were swirling but no rain to speak of yet. Everyone walked their usual routes to school and work and had full size umbrellas ready to deploy. This gave me a clue as to how much it rains at one time. The mountains in Mokošica, the small inlet off of Dubrovnik where we had our apartment, had a mix of low-hanging clouds and blue sky throughout the four days we were there. The fall sun was the perfect counter-balance to the cooler fall weather. The waterway of this area led to a small marina with each of the houses up and down having their own smaller boats at their personal docks (which also served as driveways). 

At first, we thought the narrow street was a back-way to the apartment … but, no, it is actually quite a main road to the marina and up to the town above. The best way to go about our daily errands was to walk we decided. And by walk, I mean climb stairs. You can go one street up with the first hundred stairs, and then two streets up and so on. We made it four streets up at one point finding the various separate staircases as the google map led us on walking directions. 

These four days were specially to catch up on school and to receive Grammy Pammy, our first fellow American, to join us for a sea cruise up the Dalmatian Coast the next week. She is also grandma. And the grandma who loves cards and oysters and everything adventurous. Right up the kids’ alley! We hadn’t realized how much we could use another adult to help entertain and talk to the kids. We even went out to dinner by ourselves!

The hosts of our apartment told us it probably would not actually rain very much even though the forecast was calling for 4.5 inches of rain in three days. We watched as the storm shifted from Thursday to Friday to Saturday. And then, finally, on Sunday morning, it was fully raining as our boat departed from Gruz Port.