Travel to Salzburg

Since we didn't get back from walking around the lake until pretty late last night, we had kind of a slow morning. We reheated last night's pasta and veggies for breakfast, then made up the remaining pasta with oil, cheese, and garlic (everything we had left) to have later for lunch. Times like this make me feel like I am becoming my mother. I hated it when she expected me to eat leftover cold pasta for lunch when we were traveling. However, this was really good cold leftover pasta, and it was my idea, so it was all good.

We went online to reserve our rental car and discovered that the base rate that Avis was quoting us was about half the price of the real rate once they added on the taxes and fees. Ugh. Why do they think I care what is the money they get and what is extra taxes? Oh, right, they don't. They just wanted me to make plans to use a rental car based on a lower price. We considered the car anyway for a while but eventually decided against.

By this time, it was almost time to catch our train out of Lake Bled. We'd hoped to go up to the castle for views out over the lake, but there really wasn't time. Instead we just went down to the water for a couple minutes before hurrying off to catch our train to Villach, right over the border in Austria, then switched for a train to Salzburg. On the way down to the water, we saw a nice church. The train ride was really scenic too. In our compartment on the way to Salzburg was a German student on his way home from a semester studying it Italy. We enjoyed talking with him and he urged us to visit Regansburg when we go to Germany.

From Lake Bled

From Salzburg

From Salzburg

We arrived in Salzburg around 5pm, having emailed and heard back from 2 out of 3 hostels in Salzburg that they were booked for the night, and the third one turned out to be crazy expensive. Instead we went to tourist information where they booked us a cheap room for a small fee. We got there just as it started raining heavily, but after a while it cleared up and we went out. Most things were closed, but we went on a long walk around the old town exploring the things that were still open, including:

Gardens

From Salzburg

From Salzburg

Window shopping

From Salzburg

The Dom (the big cathedral)

From Salzburg

St. Peters

From Salzburg

Maria's Abbey from the Sound of Music (it was closed, but this looked kind of familiar)

From Salzburg

Lake Bled - Bee Museum, Vintgar Gorge, Lake Walk

After checking in, we rushed off to the Bee Museum in Radovijca. It's a quaint museum that houses a working bee-hive, and various tools used in the process, and an informative movie about bees. Apparently bee-keeping was big out here. It was also an impressively cute little town.

From Lake Bled

From Lake Bled

After the museum, we caught a bus that took us around fifteen minutes from the entrance to Vintgar Gorge. Vintgar Gorge is a mile-long gorge near Lake Bled. It's a great little gorge that reminded us of Watkin's Glen. Unlike most waterfall or gorge hikes that I'm used to, we hiked downstream.

From Lake Bled

From Lake Bled

From Lake Bled

From Lake Bled

From the far end of the gorge, we hiked back to Bled by way of the quaint little town of Zasip, which afforded us nice views of the surrounding countryside. It was also a really cute town in a way the photos seem to have mostly failed to capture. The first part of the way was along a trail through the woods, which actually showed up as a road on our map! Way to feel transported back in time!

From Lake Bled

From Lake Bled

From Lake Bled

From Lake Bled

From Lake Bled

Our hostel had a kitchen, so dinner was pasta rustica – in olive oil sauté one onion, one large zucchini (eggplant substitution acceptable), a clove of garlic. Boil penne. Combine and add sufficient quantities of cheese and salt. Yum!

After dinner, we hiked around Lake Bled. The lake was beautiful and clear. There's a cute little church on the island in the lake. We made the walk in the twilight and enjoyed the scenery, played with the digital camera (flash settings), and watched the swan and duck families that lived on the lake. There is also a cute castle on the rocks above the lake. How lovely.

From Lake Bled

From Lake Bled

From Lake Bled

From Lake Bled

From Lake Bled

Ljubljana, or "The Next Next Prague"

According to Rick Steves, Krakow is "the next Prague" and Ljubljana is "the next next Prague." Well, Mary and her parents enjoyed both Prague and Krakow quite a bit back in 1993, so Ljubljana seemed like a destination not to be missed!

On our first day, after a picnic lunch up at the castle, we joined a walking tour that took us around downtown Ljubljana that we booked at the TI. He walked us all around the historic old town of Ljubljana, starting at the courthouse, showing us the bridges (cobblers, triple, and dragon), the original baroque church in Ljubljana that a lot of other Ljubljana churches are modeled after, the cathedral with it's fancy bronze door made in celebration of Pope John Paul II's visit and a fantastic ceiling, a library with windows made to look like open books, and ended the trip with a boat ride. There was more, but we were pretty tired, hot, and unfortunately more than a little out-of-it.

From Ljubljana

From Ljubljana

From Ljubljana

From Ljubljana

From Ljubljana

Not long after the tour, it was time to say goodbye to Mary's parents. There were some Cappoeira performers on the bridge outside our hostel as we walked them to the rental car and said our goodbyes. They drove off and left us to rest up in Ljubljana.

From Ljubljana

In the evening, we decided to attend a free concert of classical music that the tour guide mentioned. It was performed in St. Jakob's church. The music was excellent, but we were tired, so we darted out at intermission. Afterward, we decided to walk about for a while, and listened to some street performers.

At the center of town, we heard some drummers performing some sort of African (we think) drumming that was pretty sweet, and then there was a modern dance performance in the same square on a stage nearby (the big temporary eye-sore in front of a nice church). Did I mention the Cappoiera dancers from earlier in the day? This town sure loves to perform.

From Ljubljana

From Ljubljana

The following two days were mostly spent relaxing and planning the next segment of our trip. We thought about heading down toward Dubrovnik and then overland to Greece, but further research showed that to be a poor idea (either around 20 hours of buses through the mountains, or longer on ferries by way of Italy) that brought back memories of long overland travel that was unpleasant in Southeast Asia, so we decided to head North through Austria and Bavaria to Vienna and then fly to Athens. One of these nights we had a lovely picnic up on our balcony. Did we mention our hostel room in down town Ljubljana was a large corner room with a window overlooking the river and a balcony overlooking the square, where we could sit and listen to live music from the cafés below? And a steal at only 52 Euros per night. We could hardly drag ourselves away from it!

From Ljubljana

From Ljubljana

Plitvice Lakes National Park and Croatian Coast

Before today, we thought Watkin's Glen (New York) was the most beautiful place in the world. We were wrong. The most beautiful place in the world is actually Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia.

From Plitvice

Plitvice is a series of 16 lakes connected by a series of travertine waterfalls. (See side topic on travertine.) The park was well done too, with boardwalks over the fragile travertine getting us right up close to the action with minimal environmental impact. It all felt very wild and was very clean. The water was crystal clear and full of fish. We were a little disappointed that swimming wasn't allowed, and I'm sure anyone with a love of fishing was disappointed that wasn't allowed either, but with over a million visitors per year, keeping everyone on the boardwalks is surely what we have to thank for such a beautiful park. The other thing we have to thank for the pristine condition of the park is the recent war, during which the park saw few visitors.

Additionally, unlike so many other places we've been, it really looked like we could see our entry fee at work: there was a boat ride connecting the upper and lower sections of trail in a nice big (though slow moving) electric boats, buses connecting many points throughout the park so you could easily hike one way, and park rangers conducting tests of the water. The boardwalks were beautiful and in excellent condition, plus the routes were well chosen such that you could almost never see any other stretch of boardwalk or the tourists walking upon it, making the park seem like it had a lot fewer people in it than it really did. I don't think we saw a single piece of litter. Kudos to whoever is running this place.

Anyway, in order to beat the rush we started our hike just after opening time, 8:00 or 8:30, I think. Our hike started at the bottom of the series of lakes with a steep down hill into the gorge. On the opposite side of the gorge from the path was a tall waterfall that is not actually part of the series of lakes.

From Plitvice

Among the first things we noticed were all the many fish swimming in the brilliant water. Does this look like a healthy river or what?

From Plitvice

A bit further along was a series of caverns up the face of the gorge. There was a path, but we didn't take it since it went away from the waterfalls and we were racing the package tourists.

From Plitvice

Just beyond we came to a row boat sunk in one of the lakes. We stopped for breakfast within sight of it and in a little bit some men came and dumped the water out and set it floating on the lake.

From Plitvice

These incredible lakes and waterfalls just went on and on.

From Plitvice

And there were great blue dragonflies.

From Plitvice

Some of the lakes were very still and provided amazing reflections.

From Plitvice

Although there were many other people on the trail, often we seemed to have this magical place all to ourselves.

From Plitvice

"How did you find out about this place?" Mom and Dad wanted to know. They brought the Rick Steves guidebook, but didn't notice Plitvice with its small black and white photo.

From Plitvice

"I watched a bunch of Rick Steves PBS travel programs off NetFlix before we left," I replied. "I thought the Balkans seemed like a nice place to visit, but a week after watching the only specific place I remembered that I wanted to go was here."

From Plitvice

Josh had fun playing with his big camera.

From Plitvice

After hiking the suggested route up the 16 lakes we took the bus part way back and then walked along part of the ridge trail which provided an entirely different set of views. From here you can actually see how the lakes flow into each other.

From Plitvice

We had breakfast right along there.

From Plitvice

Would you take a look at that crowd? Sure glad we arrived early!

From Plitvice

Back at the beginning again we have the tall side waterfall in the upper right and the lowest of the waterfalls between lakes in the lower left.

From Plitvice

And here are a couple very happy travelers.

From Plitvice

After Plitvice, we moved on to the Croatian Coast. It was very pretty, although we were along a section of coast that no one goes to. We stopped at a little town and did some swimming from a pebbly beach. We also admired the fish and other sea life from the dock. This looks like a nice area for snorkeling, but we had neither the gear nor the time.

From Croatian Coast

From Croatian Coast

From Croatian Coast

We arrived at our hostel in Ljubljana (back in Slovenia) around midnight, after wandering around the pedestrian zone looking for parking. The town was still hopping, but we checked into our hostel and went right to sleep.