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. ;)

Austria is a wrap.

The Austrian portion of our adventure is over. We are on the train to Ljubljana (which in case you’ve forgotten from my blog twelve years ago, is pronounced “pu-TAY-tō”). We are pretty excited to meet up with the Allens in one of our favorites spots in Europe. They have three days to recover from jet lag before we grab the rental car and begin our journey. They landed about an hour ago, while we have already been coping with zombie-brain for five days. What better spot to recover, then Ljubljana, Slovenia? Really, all spots are the same when you are fast asleep in your AirBnB bed at 2:00 in the afternoon, because your body thinks it will never get to sleep again. But this is the place where we were able to find a large enough car to transport all six of us, and one in which the country of origin would actually allow us to go all the way to Albania and back. So this is where the big loop begins. We are still crossing our fingers about the rental car. It turns out that Mark and family were immediately picked up by their shuttle driver upon entering the airport terminal and so had no time to visit the rental car desk to inquire about our reservation. Everybody please call in your karma points for us on this one. No car, no bueno.

 

Don't think this car will fit us all. This guy was inside one of our Graz lunch restaurants. For perspective, the roof was no higher than my belly button.

 

First sighting of old town Graz

 

 

“So how was Austria?”, you ask. Absolutely fantastic! (Shout-out to my Iceland buddies. If you don’t know, don’t worry about it.) We began in Graz, and were surprised by our old friend Katharina at the airport. We thought we were going to meet her in town, but were greeted by her smiling face the second we stepped off the tarmac. For those who don’t know, Katharina is an Austrian superstar of a human being whom I met in Iceland and then gave a whirlwind two-week-tour of the Bay Area about a month later, back in 2022. We have stayed fast friends via Zoom and WhatsApp ever since.  She has now returned the tour-guiding favor, showing us Austria like only an insider could do. We’d never been to Graz. In fact, Katharina had only been there once. But she was still an excellent tour guide/navigator for all things typically found in Styria (the province wherein lies Graz.) It was all pretty cool. No drama at any point to report. Sorry. I know that drama is the stuff which makes reading the blog worth the time. But I’m not going to make up stories just to have something to tell. So this post is really just going to be a photo-dump and a description of the highlights. I am certain the drama will hit us right between the eyes soon enough. It always does.

 

War Memorial in Graz

 

Almost three years since I last saw my favorite Austrian

Proof that yes, Carol is here too.

We climbed the Schlossberg mountain in the middle of town to see the iconic clocktower shown below, that is visible from much of the outlying town. The views from up there were superb, as were the history lessons on all of the signs that greeted us as we hiked up the hill. I’ve included one pic about the tunnels that I found fascinating. We could have taken a funicular to the top, but we thought we’d get some exercise after sitting on a plane for over twelve hours. The way back down however, was never in question (at least for me). They have a slide that drops you the 64 meters through the middle of the mountain by winding you at breakneck speeds around 170 meters of winding tunnel. Super fun way to get back to the bottom of the hill. It is pitch dark in places, and lit up in others, and is the largest underground slide in the world, at least according to them.

Heading up to the top

Near the top

Crazy history

Good shot of the clock tower. Not so much of us.

Graz is located on the river Mur, a beatiful tributary of the Danube. On at least one website I read that it calls itself the culinary capital of Austria, but it also teemed with museums, parks and wonderful, medium-sized-town baroque and renaissance style architecture. Come to think of it, though, we did seem to spend almost all of our time in Graz eating. So I guess maybe they are on to something there. I could live in Graz. It’s not a big metropolis like Vienna, but it’s not a tiny town either. Around 300,000 Austrians. And probably another 50,000 tourists. Big enough to contain plenty of culture, but small enough to avoid the impersonal feel of big-city-life. Nobody would ever call Vienna cute. Graz is cute. At least the few square kilometers of the old town around Schlossberg is, especially the Hauptplatz (the medieval old town’s square). 

 

Typical Graz architecture

 

Funky iconic art museum that looks like an alien's internal organ on top, with heart valves and such. Can't see those from this shot, but I promise they are up there.

 

The cobblestone streets immediately put me in vacation mode; lacking in cars, but bustling with bicycles and the ever-present trams that, for me, set pretty much all of Europe squarely ahead of the U.S., in terms of getting from here to there without ruining here or there. We saw Eggenberg Castle, a few kilometers outside of the main town. The gardens were magnificent. We saw the town cathedrals. We climbed a double spiral staircase in a random local medieval building, just because we could. We enjoyed many a town park and many more town cafés. Carol checked out the armory which apparently is the largest historical armory in the world. Once you’ve seen ten thousand swords, I figure you’ve seen them all. But the horse armor was apparently pretty impressive. 

Fancy!

 

 

 

They don't make 'em like this in the U.S.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beats having hundreds of cars any day.

Eggenberg Castle

 

Part of the Eggenberg gardens

 

I did have a breakfast buffet snafu that was funny. There was an egg-boiling station, where they expected you to soft-boil your own egg to your liking. I just saw a basket of eggs and figured I was getting one already cooked, as it was a buffet. I cracked it open and quickly discovered otherwise. Needless to say, I went back and got a different egg when I figured out the dealio. Nothing much else to report in Graz. Beautiful scenery. Beautiful town. Beautiful people. Beautiful train-ride to Vienna.

 

Here's the buffet.

 

Here's the egg station. The color coded boiling station in the back should have tipped me off.

 

 

Vienna was a different vibe. Grandiose architecture in every direction reminding you that this is a place to be taken seriously. The home of emperors for hundreds and hundreds of years, Vienna makes you feel like you have arrived and you’d best respect the history around you, because it is alive and well in the present. Katharina started our tour at the University of Vienna, where she got her multiple degrees and where marble busts of Nobel Prize winners and 500 year-old world-changers stared at you from every corner. An apt start to a three day tour of every side street and back street in the city. Each statue and monolith and church and government building vied for the most awe-inspiring man-made thing you’d ever seen, but the real inspiration was in the incredible detail work on each building. I took so many pictures that I may need to purge my phone before we make it to Croatia.

 

Kaiser's Palace

Each river gets its own statue

I think this was the Parliament building

Some rich lady's home.

So many grandiose buildings. Can't remember which is which.

St. Stephen's Cathedral

Mozart was everywhere. If whatever it was you were interacting with at the moment wasn’t named after a dead Kaiser or Kaiserina, you could be sure that it was named Mozart@$&#. We didn’t go in the opera-house this time around for lack of time, but we sure as hell got accosted by Mozart-dressed actors trying to sell us tickets to 83 different classical concerts/operas/musicals/plays that were going on each night in any of the 83 marbled concert halls in the six square kilometers of downtown. I actually don’t know if I am exaggerating here or not. But I did just make up that number off the top of my head. If you’ve met me, you were probably on top of that fact before I fessed up, but just in case…

National Opera House where Amadeus did his thing.

And here he is in all his glory.

 

Sadly, on this trip, Carol has to work on weekday evenings. She sightsees with me in the mornings and up until 4:00ish, but then she logs into work, and I am on my own for the rest of the waking hours. Thankfully, I had Katharina to keep me company in Vienna, and I will have the Allens the rest of the way. So I’m good. I just feel bad for Carol, because she has to miss some stuff. For example, Katharina and I took a train to a cute little town on the Danube, about an hour north of Vienna, called Krems, to visit with our friend Simone, who also was on the Iceland trip with us. We had a blast catching up as even Katharina hadn’t seen Simone in about a year, and for me, it had been three. 

Krems

Other highlights included the Albertina art museum, with a Monet and Picasso exhibition, a ride to the top of St. Stephen’s Cathedral for epic views of the city, a walk along an arm of the Danube, a stroll through many of the gorgeous city parks including Katharina’s favorite, the Liechtenstein Gardens. We saw and partook of farmer’s markets and dozens of fancy bakeries and chocolatiers and we ate Wienerschnitzel and wursts, and cheese and gooseberries. We came, we saw, we ate. We left. Three days is not enough for a city the size of Vienna, even when you have a handy-dandy local to show you every shortcut. Thankfully, we had been here before, and had seen much of the touristy stuff already, like Schonnbrunn Palace, and so could skip a good deal of it. But still, more time would have been great, if not to go to a concert or an opera, at least to spend more time with our beloved friend. But seven other countries and a family full of Allens await. So our Austria trip is now a done deal. We are on the train in Maribor, Slovenia as I type this. We’ll be back here in our rental car in a few days. Seems like we are traveling in figure eights rather than straight lines. But you got to do what you got to do when you want to see it all.

Liechtenstein Gardens

Walking along the river

Incidentally, if you’ve read this far, congratulations, you’ve got staying power. But please know that I don’t expect anyone to actually read all of my drivel. It is for me to look back on in posterity, as much as it for others to travel along with us. So good for you, but please don’t feel compelled to read every word of every post. There will not be a test at the end. It is okay to simply peruse the pictures. I will keep it PG, nonetheless, just in case…

Nothing says Austria, for me, more than the Mannerwaffle store

Until I next post (probably once we are done with Slovenia)…

 

Just Hours Away!

 Just Hours Away!

We are about to head off into unknown territory again. Thought I might give blogging another shot. Not sure why this particular adventure gets to be documented when Guatemala, Belize, Grenada, Fiji, Ireland, Iceland, Istanbul, South Africa, Spain (twice), Portugal (twice), France, and probably others that I am not recalling presently, never got their chance to shine on the blog. Perhaps it is because this is a six-week trip, so it feels a bit more significant than those others. But whatever the reason, I am making a stab at it. Hope I am not the only one who ever reads what I write here.

We are going to eight countries in all this trip. Three that we have already been to, but have perfectly good reasons to visit again: Austria, Slovenia and Croatia. We are going to Austria to visit our friend Katharina, who I met in Iceland, and then hosted for a couple of fantastic weeks here in Northern California, showing her every conceivable spot we could manage in fourteen days. Now she gets to return the favor for five or six days in her own home country. She lives in Vienna, her hometown is Salzburg, but we are meeting her in Graz. We'll do Vienna again too, through the eyes of a local this time. Slovenia is where the driving part of the trip starts and ends, as it was the only country where we could find a car that would fit six people and let us drive all the way to the northern Greece border and back. And we are doing Croatia again, because we only saw a small sliver of that country last time and we have much grander designs this time around.  And no, we are not actually going to set foot in Greece. That is a different trip, for a different time. But we will be close enough to throw stones, and I just might. :)

Before I list the other five countries, I need to answer that nagging question in the back of your mind: Six? Sadly neither Chloe nor Josh can join us on this trip. Chloe is a working adult with no chance of taking a long vacation. Josh is moving to Irvine, CA to look for his first job out of college. He just graduated with a degree in "Creative Technology and Design" from CU Boulder, and therefore has no shot of actually finding a job in Irvine or anywhere else, as technology jobs are at a ratio of about 1/1000 in terms of availability versus jobseekers. :(  But try he must, and his girlfriend is moving there for law school so it is as good a place as any to hit the pavement. So "who are the other four people on our trip?" you politely ask again, as I annoyingly digress. None other than our good friends, the Allens, who also went on the South American adventure with us, which is apparently the last trip that merited a blog. They won't join us until we hit Slovenia, so the first week in Austria is just Carol and I. Carol and me? I never could get that straight. "It is I!" sounds weirdly correct. But "It is me" also seems right as "me" is the object of the verb is, and I thought "me" is for objects and "I" is for subjects. Anyway. It is just the two of us visiting Austria, and Katharina makes three.

Okay, so the drive takes us from Slovenia, through Croatia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Kosovo(arguably part of Serbia), Montenegro, North Macedonia (Why the "North"? It's not like there is a South Macedonia. I will have to look into that.) and Albania. Eventually we will make a loop of it, and get back to Slovenia to drop off the car. Assuming there is a car. This is the first bit of drama for the trip. We booked a seven passenger minivan. The problem is first that such a car was nearly impossible to find. We were on the verge of giving up on even trying, when this offering magically appeared at the eleventh hour. We had tried in at least four separate countries, even adjusting plans to include Italy for a bit. And worse, when we tried to change the date of the booking, we found that such a car also did not exist (not just wasn't available) to be booked for any day from anywhere in Slovenia. We called the booking agency, and they couldn't help us. They told us that if the website said we had a minivan, then we had a minivan. We left the reservation as is, but are now quite iffy about whether the car we reserved even exists. If it does not, and we are left standing at the rental counter with an empty reservation and no recourse, we will have to drive two separate cars the whole way. That would stink poopies. Way less fun, not being all together. Way more expensive in terms of gas and parking. Way more stressful, as we would have to find extra parking, not to mention, each other for 33 days in a row. Just poopies. But we can't think of anything to do other than call them for reassurance that the minivan will actually be there as we booked it when we get to Slovenia.  Fingers and toes are crossed. 3000 kilometers of driving fun are dependant upon the existence of that van! There are no trains that we could use for this itinerary. We have seventeen places booked. It is "Our way or the highway!" Wait, the highway is our way. We definitely may be screwed.

But first, Graz, Austria. We leave home in about two hours. Carol is desperately fixing the new watering system in the backyard that she just installed, hoping beyond hope that things are still alive when we return. I am dropping Gromit off at the pet-sitters. Thankfully he only has to be there for five days now and few more at the end of our trip. In between, Josh will be here with him. But he is in France with his belle for now, and will be in Irvine by the time we get back. Hopefully, I will post again when we have arrived. Until then, "tschau"!