Dragon Heartstring

Slovenia

We got the car! Granted it is not the car we reserved. But it is a functioning vehicle that easily seats nine, so the six of us fit with ease. There will be no driving two cars. The party van is a go! Joy abounds. Relief pervades. All is well. Thank you all for donating karma points to the cause. So now our only issue is with docking the behemoth every night. He is 1.97 meters tall. (There is no way he is a she, or even a they; too many right angles and straight lines.) Last night’s parking garage had clearance for exactly 2.00 meters. I had to remove the radio antenna. But we fit. This time. The van is too wide for many parallel parking situations, and way too long to fit in a normal lot parking spot. The aforementioned garage had no spots that we could fit into, so we parked in one where sticking way too far out will hopefully not put us in the way of other vehicles trying to maneuver around us. I doubt they will tow us for being in the way, because that seems nearly impossible in such a tiny space. But they may charge us double or something when we return to pick him up. We have named the party van Luka, because he seems to have trouble with his girth, and he’s from Slovenia. If you know, you know.  So I may refer to him as Luka in later posts, which will inevitably confuse some of my readers and make them want to stop reading. So maybe I won’t. We’ll see. But the bottom line is that the overall feeling is one of relief that Luka is a real boy, and not just a figment of the website’s imagination. He is in our possession for the remainder of the trip, and that positive far outweighs any concern over parking, or extra tolls, or worse gas mileage. Drama averted.

Upon Meeting the Behemoth at Ljubljana Airport

And its Substantial Backside

But we fit! Though in separate timezones.

For comparison, only five of us, and we were pretty cramped in that Renault Clio

Before we met Luka, we had a few days in Ljubljana. It is one of those European big cities where if you wander too far from the old town, it gets a bit ugly and a bit dirty and impersonal. But as long as you stay near the castle and the river, and in the old town, it is spectacular. We went on four or five walks a day through the old town. Seeing every alley, and every store front. We sampled more local cuisine (burek!) than should be legal. But hey, we’ve got plenty of room in the party van to fit our ever-expanding bellies, so why the heck not? I had a blogpost way back in 2013 called something like “the land of the endless gelato”. Too lazy to go back and find it. But not too lazy to head out of the apartment one more time to sample yet another vendor’s offering of the stuff. So much ice cream!!!!

One time, the ice cream was disguised as alcohol milkshakes, but still.

The castle in Ljubljana can be walked up to, but why do that when they have such a cool funicular to get you there in style? We did walk down. Once up top, the views are amazing, with the southern Alps in the distance and the gorgeous little town below. Some fascinating stuff in the museums up there, including many an art exhibition, kept us well entertained for an entire morning and then some. Back in town, the local farmer’s market is so good, that I have excellent memories of it from last time we were here over a decade ago. It didn’t disappoint. We also stumbled upon an evening open air market, that seems to happen every Friday night, with about forty different hot-food stands vying for the patronage of about, at any given moment, a thousand drooling would-be tourists and locals alike. Every type of food from around the world that you could imagine, all within a stone’s throw. 

Riding up the Funicular

Inside Ljubljana Castle

View of Town from the Highest Point in the Castle

Cool Impressionist Art Exhibit Displayed on the Castle Walls

The purists in the group prefer to simply see the framed paintings as originally intended.

We crossed the river dozens of times, using each of the dozen or so bridges that hover over the Ljubljanica. Basically, we saw it all, and we loved it all, as I knew we would. When there are six of you, it is more difficult to interact with the locals than when it is just one or two of you. So of course our longest interactions were with waiters. They all seem to have the same dead-pan sense of humor where they like to mess with the tourists to get a reaction and then fess up once said reaction has played itself out. One guy in particular got us at least three times. “I’m sorry. We can’t serve alcohol until 5:00…” Pause. Awkward silence. “Just kidding, large beer or small?” It is not that funny when I retell the tale. But I promise that the delivery kept us smiling for three days. It rained on us a fair amount, but we weren’t that upset about it, because we know that as we head farther and farther south in the middle of July, we are going to have to deal with some heat. So we’ll take the cool and the damp while we can.

The Lovely Ljubljanica River

The iconic pink church as viewed from one of the "three bridges"

Typical Ljubljana Art

The famous Dragon Bridge

There were dragons everywhere you looked.

I am something of a legend here as well.

Plenty of fancy architecture in Ljubljana, but quite different than Austria.

Things were cute on the inside too. This is a shot inside our lunch restaurant.

On Saturday, we decided to go farther afield and visit one of the ubiquitous cave systems in Slovenia. This was the day before meeting Luka, so we had to rent a completely separate car for the journey. Carol stayed back to get some work done as she and I already visited a different cave here twelve years ago and this way we could just get a normal sized car. It is funny. I thought we were going to see the same caves I’d seen in 2013. I mean how many tourist attraction, giant cave systems could there be? Not until we were riding the train into the cave did I realize that it was a completely different cave system than I’d visited before. The other was about fifteen kilometers further south. Then I learned that there are tens of thousands of separate caves in Slovenia and they discover a few hundred new ones every year. This would all be only mildly interesting if you didn’t understand that the single cave we visited was so large that we had to take a ten-minute train ride into the cave before walking over a mile, seeing only about ten percent of it, and then train-ride back out again. Many of the individual chambers in the cave were larger than a ten-story apartment building. These were massive cave systems. So tens of thousands of them? Sheesh. Cool experience, whether you go to the Sjocan caves we went to a decade ago, or you visit the Postojnska Jama caves that we saw this time around. No hard hat required. You ain’t spelunking. You’re craning your neck trying to find the ceiling.

Cave shots were difficult to make show the size of the place.

Terrible photo, but at speed in the dark, that is what you get.

Take my word for it. Super cool.

We also visited a castle about a fifteen minute drive from the cave. Apparently it is the largest castle in the world built into a cave of its own. The tour was pretty cool, telling us about the people who lived in this castle for hundreds of years. It focused mainly on one dude who defended himself and his kin from a siege for over a year, getting supplies from a secret back entrance to the caves. Apparently one of his servants eventually got fed up with being cannonballed and betrayed his master by letting the attackers know when the guy was in the bathroom, which stuck out a wee bit from the cave, and was therefore the most vulnerable spot in the castle. He died while on the pooper as the privy collapsed over him under heavy fire and he became a bit of folk hero.

That castle in the background is the real thing.

Up close

Inside the castle

One of these is probably the one that killed our hero.

Speaking of folk heroes, none is so omnipresent as St. George, who slew a dragon in seemingly every town in the Balkans. You can’t turn a corner without seeing a statue of him and his dragon. Ljubljana is the dragon city, so its mascot is everywhere. But we found George and the dragon in Celje and Ptuj and now Zagreb as well. Even the caves had their own dragon myths, as they are so proud of the little newt-like creatures ,called Olm, that live in the complete darkness of the cave systems, and tell tales of how these are baby dragons unable to come to maturity without the sun. They even had a little aquarium type setup with a bunch of these cave-salamander dudes in it for everyone to see right there in the middle of the cave, over a mile from daylight. Apparently they can live for a hundred years and can last ten years without any food. I can’t last ten minutes without another gelato it seems…

Okay, not an Olm. But while we were in the cave, Carol was exploring Ljubljana, and she took this picture on the main square. Apparently there is nothing odd about walking your emu through town.

So that brings me to the rest of Slovenia. We had to leave our beloved Ljubljana and start our journey. Three of us drove the little rental car to the airport, dropped it off, and collected Luka the party van. We then drove back to town to pick up the other three and headed off into the country for the first leg of our adventure. We were eventually to touchdown in Zagreb, Croatia, but we made a day of it, taking the scenic route and stopping in a few smaller towns. Celje is the third largest city in Slovenia. We ate lunch at one of the endless outdoor cafes, enjoying the atmosphere but getting a different vibe as it was Sunday and most of the town was closed down, as Europe tends to do on Sunday. We took a stroll along the river and photographed the requisite castle on the hill, but didn’t bother to go up to that one. Our Celje experience was pleasant and low-key. 

It is standard procedure on the highway to drive as far to the edge of the road as possible during slow traffic, so that emergency vehicles can get through as fast as possible.

Fun times on the highway. At one point, while we were all hugging the edge, one car wasn't close enough to the car in front of him, in the mind of the driver in the car behind him. So even though we were going about 2 km/hr, the back car decided he needed to pass the one in front. The one in front took exception to the move. There was much jockeying of position. Road rage was real. It is good thing this was Slovenia, and not America and nobody had a gun in their glovebox. We were all very much enjoying the show however as it played out in extremely slow motion for quite some time. 

The Celje River was a beauty. Castle is on the hill in the distant background.

More of the river walk.

Closer shot of the castle.

Celje town square.

Then we drove to Ptuj. It is pronounced Puh-too-eee. Just as if you were attempting to ascertain if the peasants below were actually within spitting distance of the castle walls. Ptuj is an ancient small town with a ton of charm. We did hike up to the castle. We also checked out a clock tower with the longest authentic time keeping pendulum in the world. Sixteen meters, or so, I calculated, based on the period of oscillation. Once a physics nerd, always a physics nerd. We checked out the church, had an ice cream (of course) and then were on our way again. 

Clock Tower in Ptuj.

At the bottom of the pendulum looking up.

Inside Ptuj Castle

Good views from up there.

More views from the castle.

City hall in Ptuj

We crossed the border into Croatia, which isn’t much of a border as both are in the E.U., and finished the ride to Zagreb. All was easy-peasy until we had our first encounter with a parking garage as described above. But the van is docked, the multitudes are comfy in the apartment, and Slovenia is now but a memory. We have done a fair amount of walking around Zagreb already, but that is the topic of a different post. Only one country per post. You’ll have to wait. ;)