The weather didn’t help. Rain blanched the spring landscape grey, a hue somewhere between battleship and institutional gruel. Storms churned across all of Eastern Europe. Thousands evacuated as the Danube overflowed. No one was stripping to scanties at the beach.

“Where, exactly, are the ladies?” Edward asked, as we surveyed an overgrown Roman ruin. “You promised chicks,” he complained days later, as we hiked along the Plitvica Jezera, a cascading chain of peacock-colored lakes. “Maybe that Black Madonna icon could send me just one gorgeous woman?” he suggested at the famous pilgrimage church of Marija Bistrica.

And finally, in a fit of exasperation – and to distract from the bomb craters and old tank barricades on the Bosnian border – “What type of wingwoman are you anyway? I fly 5,000 miles and you can’t produce a single babe?”

***

On yet another damp afternoon, I’m flipping through the guidebook, while Edward channel-surfs. Most stations broadcast nothing but teasers for Italian porn chat lines. “Look!” I exclaim, pointing at the screen. “Sexy women with no clothes! Finally!”

He sneers: “Those are not quality nudes.”

“Picky, picky. Are you holding out for a sexy Balkanite?”

“There are no sexy Balkanites,” he says. “You lied to me.”

“Never,” I declare. “We’ve just had bad luck. But that’s all about to change: we, my friend, are going to Trogir. ‘The Stone Beauty’ is a fortress-island famous for naked women.”

He perks up considerably. So much, in fact, that I don’t have the heart to explain the joke: the city boasts the oldest nude in Dalmatia, a thirteenth-century sculpture of Eve over the cathedral’s entrance.

Instead, I plot a course along the coast, praying the clouds part and the beaches overflow with topless supermodels.

***

The windshield wipers skreek, sliming water across the car window. Edward says, “I think you drove off the island.” (CONTINUE...)