Slovenia, you should know, is precious and beautiful!
I had heard good things about Slovenia, a cozy little cosmopolitan country north of Croatia. During our visit we got a good flavor for the culture. A welcoming mixture of German efficiency, understated Scandinavian design, and your grandmother’s comfy living room. The walkable capitol city, Ljubljana, is a university town filled with public art and laid back hipsters (and blessedly, not too many tour buses). Judging from the number of outdoor cafes and open air markets the residents know how to enjoy a sunny day. Maybe their winters are long?
We had 3 nights in Ljubljana and 3 nights up in the Alps in the north of Slovenia.
In getting to Ljubljana we first had two one night stops to get from the Croatian seaside to the inland forested countryside. One night stops are not our preference. They are of course rushed and usually stressful… transitions are always hard. The boys are doing better and better with packing up on their own so we can travel efficiently on these short stops. We made an overnight stop in a somewhat raucous Croatian party town of Split. Remarkable only in that we had a cheap but nice place for the night some good pizza and were able to pick up a car.
We stayed the next night in a very cute B&B near Plitvice Lakes National park in Croatia. House Tina prepared dinner for us which was a glorious plate of bbq’d meats! Sadly, no picture of this giant platter was captured as we were sooo hungry.
~just kidding of course we took a picture.
Croatia’s Plitvice Lakes National park is a true natural marvel. Mother Nature, through a mashup of topological and geological tricks, has created a tightly packed series of 14 small ponds and lakes. Each lake is naturally terraced one above the next.
The aquamarine lakes are separated by dozens upon dozens of beautiful waterfalls.
Now being from Michigan and Wisconsin I feel I know a thing or two about beautiful waterfalls. Let me tell you, these waterfalls and the way they are so tightly clustered together and presented to visitors by way of an intimate network of trails and boardwalks, are nothing short of breathtaking.
Predictably, Elliot lost his footing on the boardwalk and fell into the edge of one of the small ponds, about up to his waist. His pride was hurt more than anything.
Around every corner is a panoramic view of waterfalls that would be worth of a day trip in their own right… Visiting so many beautiful natural wonders one right after the other is a bit of a waste. After the 5th spectacular set of falls you’re just numb to the splendor. Like eating your favorite ice cream six times in one hour… it’s just too much. Luckily, we just enjoyed a peaceful hike on a nice day in an otherworldly setting… of course snapping picture after picture along the way…
Croatia was a great visit. Add it to your list. Plenty to do or not do. Friendly folks, good food, more affordable than Italy, world class adventuring to be had!
Plus, we found some of our best signs in Croatia…
The ‘no washing your bus sign’
And Elliot’s addition to our growing sign collection:
‘Alien abductions allowed’:
So now onto Slovenia and its wonderful capitol Ljubljana!
With amazingly-friendly mostly english-speaking residents, excellent gelato and finally beer with some weight to it Ljubljana won us over. I even located some Founders brew in a little beer shop!
After traveling for about a month at this point we needed a solid city like Ljubljana to take care of a few business-y things.
- See the star water ‘Solo’ movie
- We needed to print some things for the boys ‘schooling’
- General downtime
Ljubljana fit the bill. While we where there we visited their science fair, the best two gelato shops, a place with an awesome burger and IPA combo, and a castle (naturally).
Nice work Ljubljana! You even had a sweet old school movie theatre within walking distance where we could catch Star Wars in English with Slovenian subtitles!
Now on to the Alps! The Julian Alps to be precise. I didn’t look up why they are called the Julian Alps… you can if you want!
Of course the Julian Alps are remote and beautiful. The view from our place…
Again we went with the nice B&B. An organic farm with a hardworking family running the show. We might not be so well cared for again…
The formula for these places we’re learning is that an entrepreneurial family takes their outsized well located home and converts it into a B&B. They then provide a varied and scrumptious breakfast… if you opt for the ‘full board’ option (meaning dinner also included’) you get a home cooked meal that’s just this side of gourmet. We loved it…. The boys made the best of it.
Each morning you would come down for breakfast and they would have a menu of what was planned for the evening dinner. After breakfast you tell them if you want to have dinner as well… based on the full dining room at dinner, I’d guess that most guests were a ‘yes’ for the dinner option.
The hiking in the Julian Alps is good. With the boys we needed to keep it shortish and extra sweet (increase ice cream stops) We can get in about 5 miles over 4 hours with them if we’re lucky. Especially if there are things to stop and see along the way.
We were staying near the town of Kobarid. (Ko-BA-reed) Which it turns out was the site of an protracted WW1 battle, many battles actually… years long. The area/valley is bisected by the Soca river (pronounced So-cha) so the battles here were said to be along the ‘Soca front’. We hiked past memorials, thru battle trenches cut into solid rock and thru the narrow valley where hundreds of thousands of men died fighting. It was sobering and interesting to learn about a piece of history we didn’t know a lot about.
The hillsides are sheer and hiking thru them you can scarcely imagine where tens of thousands of men would even manage to find ground flat enough to fight…
The winters here are severe and the mountains steep. We read that during the winters of the war 60,000 soldiers encamped here died from just avalanches! 60,000 dead from avalanches. Over the course of maybe 3 years, Hundreds of thousands of Austro-Hungarians and Italians died fighting within the valley where we were visiting.
There are roadside memorials everywhere.
As I said, sobering. Lots of questions from the boys. They are learning a lot of history. We visited the concentration camp Dachau north of Munich a few weeks ago and we talked about WW2. Now a pretty good dose of WW1. It keeps us on our toes as we’re not usually able to spit out bite sized historical synopsis’s that relate the reasons for the wars, who were the good and bad guys, how did it start and end etc.
Anyway, sorry to end on a somber note here. But you can’t tour Europe without crossing paths with some tragic history.
Thanks for tuning in.
Aaron
