Natural Beauty of Slovenia

Days 1 & 2 - Piran to Ljubljiana 

Our overnight flight ended with a fantastic view of the Alps from 30,000 feet.  Somehow the peaks are still covered in snow.

Then, as we landed we got a beautiful view of Venice.  If you can zoom in to this image, you can really see everything!

After a two hour drive on the highway, we arrived in Piran.  First let me say the roads here are spectacularly better than home.  Every road seems to be freshly paved, no potholes in sight, and we watched them building a new overpass using the coolest equipment we don't have at home.

Back to Piran, we arrived at our place in Portoroz, which was this super pretty little neighborhood, and took a 10 minute bus ride into Piran.  There is no driving in Piran becuase it's just a town of little cobblestone streets. But man was it pretty!

Little cobble stone streets reminded us of Uzes a little.

I love old doors

Beautiful Church overlooking the town

I was so surprized by the beauty of this church inside.

View from the church steps.

As do many of these towns, there is a square where town gatherings happen, while we were there there was a band playing Slovenian music, which kind of reminded me of Turkish music a little.  It was like my theme music :) 

And we enjoyed a little lunch in the square, too.

Next we tackled the town walls.  The city is built on a peninsula, so there was this beautiful, tall wall all along the border with the mainland.  We climbed up and walked along it for some stunning views.

 

Looking back at the mainland

After the day of exploring, we went back to our apartment to freshen up, then enjoyed a dinner at a little local place that was delicious and, like everything here, so inexpensive, and hit the sack hard! We were exhausted.

The next morning we woke up and had breakfast in our town of Portoroz, which reminded us a bit of Palma or Bodrum, but on a smaller scale.

Breakfast! (It's just iced coffee)

After breakfast, our first stop was one of the over 10,000 caves in tiny Slovenia. This one is set up for tourists and is 25km deep. 

The building at the entrance was even pretty, this place is just lovely!

entrance to the cave

Once inside, we saw the coolest formations.  Millions of years ago, this was all underwater, and as the water receded, these caverns were left. And as the waters in the earth dripped down, they deposited minerals (limestone, calcium, iron) creating these crazy rock formations.  It takes 20-30 years for these rocks to grow 1mm.  Insane! 

Next we headed to Pradjama Castle, which was built right into one of these cave systems.  The castle was an impenetrable fortress, and they used the the cave part of the castle to hide and to come out another side for provisions while under attack. 

Lunch first

They had rooms set up as they would have been then, with original furniture and all.

You can see where natural cave wall and man made wall meet.

Leading to the cave part of the castle, they added a drawbridge for extra security

Cave part of the castle, where they would hide when necessary. 

By the way, this was our tiny car that Jason hates! 

Once we finished enjoying the castle, we headed to Ljubljana, which Jason remembers so fondly, but was worried it was not what he remembered from 17 years ago.  As we pulled up to our Airbnb, his fears were really growing.  The neighborhood was kind of sketchy.  The apartment itself was clean and modern and had all of the amenities it said it would, but really, it was not what we wanted for 2 nights, so we just ate the money we spent on that place and booked a fabulous hotel we found right in the center of town.  As I was checking in, they said Jason stayed here before! He didn't remember this was the place he stayed, but it was! Our room was on the top floor with a huge balcony and a spectacular view! Well worth the change!

The View from our balcony was breathtaking!

After freshening up, we took to the streets for an evening on the town.  Man is this town pretty, I can't wait to stroll around tomorrow! There was some food festival going on, so we decided to take part for dinner.

 

Then we walked the streets and hit a few cafes for some wine and beer and went to bed.  Tomorrow we will properly explore this whole city, it's churches, castles, bridges, and all! 

Anniversary Trip to Italy

On our last full day in Italy, we got up in Amalfi and headed north to Rome to return our car, but on the way we decided to stop in Pompeii. It was so unexpectedly cool. The city was originally built by the ancient Greeks, then taken over by the Romans, so some of the buildings we stood in were actually 2,500 years old and possibly older and the preservation of the city frozen in time by a volcano eruption was really unbelievable. Jason kept saying how everyone should have to visit Pompeii in their lives because it’s just an experience that you could never teach. If we thought in Rome old was “old”, in Pompeii it left your mouth wide open. We never expected it to be so large or so well preserved. It was a full city and we visited a bank, a bakery, a brothel, a bar, someone’s home, the town centers, a Christian Basilica, Egyptian temple, a Roman temple… it was a cosmopolitan port city that catered to everyone and had everything. There were pipes that brought running water into people’s shops and homes and beautiful mosaics on the floors of the homes. The casts of real people frozen in motion and emotion as the lava swallowed them was chilling. It’s only 75% excavated so far and we only took in a fraction of that, but we left totally impressed and satisfied.

We turned in our car in Rome and sat in a bar overlooking the Coliseum and had some beer and paninis before boarding our sleeper train back to Venice, where we woke up and had some coffee and pastries and said goodbye to Italy as our water taxi took us to the airport. I

t was a long 10 hour flight home, but if you can travel on long, intercontinental flights in first class, do it because those seats that lay flat were more comfortable than the sleeper train beds.


I don’t know if you can tell, but we loved Italy and we are already planning our next trip back. But our next big stop is Turkey, so tune in for that trip report next…..

For more pictures, visit flikr (there are two pages of pictures, so make sure to check all pages)...

Anniversary Trip to Italy

We began our journey in Venice...



After landing in the airport, we took the train onto the island of Venice and as we walked from the platform out to the main entrance, the grand canal unfolded before us and even Jason, the jaded world traveler whose answer to everything is always, "I’ve seen that before," couldn’t help but stop and smile. It was like nothing we imagined and yet everything we thought it would be. 

We took a Vaporetto (a water bus, essentially) to our hotel, took a little nap, then started walking around. We had an amazing lunch and just took in the marvel of a city built on canals. We had heard it smelled bad there, but it didn’t at all and it was very clean, with street venders out cleaning their sidewalks every morning. Venice has no real industry left except for tourism, which made this a very expensive city, like a Disneyland, they jack up the prices and the rich tourists keep coming and spending. It was also a good city to start our trip into Italy as neither of us speaks Italian, but everyone in Venice speaks English.

 It was very romantic... We strolled though St Mark’s square, walked to the Rialto bridge (right), crossed the bridge of sighs, and we did the requisite gondola ride through the quiet canals (our gondolier even sang for us). It really was beautiful.


For more pictures, visit flikr...