Visit to the Byllis Archeological Park. And, bought some more flight tickets!

I'll tell you about the flight tickets first. 

We've had our flight to Canada booked for quite a while because I got a super cheap deal back in March on a one way flight across the pond from Barcelona direct to Halifax, Nova Scotia on August 28th.

So we're going to be spending nine days with our daughter and her family in Nova Scotia. But then we still needed to get from Halifax to Ottawa on August 28th. And I've been watching prices for almost three months waiting to see if they'll drop.

But they're not dropping! And they're ridiculously expensive, which is not entirely surprising given that we'll be in Canada. 

Halifax to Ottawa is about a two hour flight. The cost is $322 CAD ($235 USD).

For perspective, our seven and a half hour flight from Barcelona to Halifax was $284 CAD ($207 USD).

Oh well. You win some and you lose some. Not very good value, but I went ahead and bought the tickets because there is increasing risk of the prices actually going higher. It's all a crapshoot.

Oh, and we're paying to bring grandson Cameron (14) back to Ottawa with us to spend a week with Grandma and Grandpa. Fortunately his return flight is in September so it was a little cheaper.

Okay, so back to the present. We did an hour and a half drive yesterday to the Byllis Archeological Park.

Byllis is located on a hill with fantastic views in all directions.

It cost 400 lek ($6.50 CAD, $4.75 USD) each to get in.

The city was built and occupied by the Illyrians around 350BC.

There are quite a few mosaic floors.

Unfortunately most of the mosaic floors are covered with plastic and gravel and you can't see them. Really a shame because we find the mosaic floors to be the most interesting aspect of some of these old ruin sites.

The city became a Roman colony around 30BC and was occupied until about 400AD.

Another ancient mosaic floor.

Me, amid the ruins.

Scenery along the way.

The 2.2 km long city walls were built almost 2,500 years ago!

There really isn't much left of any of the structures though.

The ancient wall.

We only saw about ten other people the whole time we were there.

The cisterns.

The arsenal.

It was nice that the informational boards are in both Albanian and English.

The theater.

The views are spectacular.

The site itself is not spectacular. We've been to much better ruins sites such as Aphrodisias in Turkiye. However the views were very impressive.

This is all that remains of the theater.

Apparently the seating blocks were dismantled during the 4th century to attempt to reinforce the deteriorating wall.

View from where an ancient house once stood.

After we left the ruins site, we tried to take some back roads back to Berat. I had my suspicions that this would not work, since many back roads in Albania are only suitable for four wheel drive. We ended up being surprised that one road was freshly paved, but it came to an abrupt stop in the middle of nowhere and we weren't able to continue. Oh well, it was a bit of an adventure!

We passed by a huge new solar panel installation.

This morning, we are walking back into town to try to recover one of my debit cards. The other day, we were taking money out to pay for the dentist when the machine wouldn't give my card back. It ended up eating it, and the bank itself was closed on a Saturday. 

This has happened a few times during our travels, but we are well prepared by having several different cards from several different institutions so it's highly unlikely we would ever be stuck for cash. But it's still frustrating when it happens.

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Record low deal on the Jackery Explorer 300 Portable Power Station.

And in Canada...

Check out the deals at Amazon.ca.