Portoroz Day 2 (August 19, 2012)

Ralph here.  This day was overall pretty low-key.  I got in a short run down the hill, along the shore, and back up the hill to our hotel (OK, the ‘up’ part was more of a climb than a run).  Lynnae and I then lounged around awhile, enjoying the lifestyle (and views) of the European idle class:

Around noon we walked down to the water to go swimming.  Slovenia only has about fifteen miles of coastline, and none of it is beach; instead, there are walkways along the Adriatic Sea with piers and steps into the water.  We found a shaded spot along the cement boardwalk where some other tourists had encamped, laid down our belongings, and took the cement steps into the water.  [We don’t have any photos because we left our camera behind.  We didn’t want to leave it unattended on the shore.]

The seawater was about eighty degrees (Fahrenheit) and extremely salty.  I have never been a good swimmer, but it was easy when the water salinity keeps you so close to the surface.  We were in and out of the water for a couple hours and, when we started to collect our belongings and decamp, we discovered that my sunglasses had been stolen.  While this act of Slavic larceny put me into a foul mood for a while, was really not that big of a deal and ended up being the worst thing that happened to us while on a month’s vacation.  [I was just so happy that the cash and credit card we had hidden in our shoes was untouched.]

We headed toward Portoroz’s only mini-golf course, and en route bought ice cream at one of the hundreds of such shops along the few miles of coastline in the town.  [The ice cream was delicious and pretty reasonably priced.]  The mini-golf course was itself pretty shabby and low-rent: instead of artificial turf, there was uneven cement that ensured every stroke ended with the golf ball wandering in a Markov Chain-inspired tour of the cup’s vicinity.  I don’t remember who won, but I’m sure Lynnae does.

We ate dinner [at a nice seaside restaurant] and headed back to our hotel, packed up, and prepared for the next day’s travels back to the mountains of northwest Slovenia.

Portoroz Day 1 (August 18, 2012)

Lynnae here.  We slept in late.  Our hotel didn’t have breakfast so we didn’t need to be up.  We ate our breakfast foods out on the balcony.  It was already hot by 10am so we decided this would be a great day for a long hike.

We walked along the Sea to the town of Piran which is on a peninsula.

Town of Piran

The square used to be a marina.  It was buried and remade into a town square.  The building and tower you see in the background is the church of St. George.

Tartini square – deserted.  Why hang out in the broiling sun when you can hang out in the sea?

People camped out on the rocks – St. George up top

Piran is a walled city.  Below is a photo of the walls on the hill.

We wanted to see the Navigation Museum but it was closed for a three hour lunch.  So instead, we walked through the city streets and up to the church of St. George.  We were only allowed into the vestibule.

Church of St. George – Italy in the distance behind

Interior of the church

Sculpture of St. George slaying the dragon.  Curiously enough, the dragon is on a leash being held by that woman.

From the church, we wandered back down through town.  Piran is charming to walk around because it’s right on the water, and it’s retained some of its medieval character due to the narrow streets, city walls and random archways like below.

City Streets

We ate a late lunch at a seaside restaurant.  Ralph was unimpressed with the tiny Italian coffee but the food was good.

[The cup was much smaller, and much less full, than this photo suggests.  I would know.]

So after lunch, we headed back to the Navigation Museum [a museum of Italian, Slovene, and Croatian seafaring in the regions of Istria and Dalmatia].  It was just opening.  We paid our entry fee and the worker walked ahead of us into the rooms to turn on the lights.  It was a great little museum.  There were laminated English guides by each door.  The information was great but I was far more interested in the gorgeous house the museum was in.

Ralph with a figurehead

The interior

We briefly flirted with the idea of taking a long inland trail back to Portoroz but decided against it as we were feeling the heat.  So we walked back the way we came along the sea.  Once we reached Portoroz we stopped at a Mercator to stock up on groceries.  We trekked up to our hotel and relaxed briefly before realizing we needed to address our laundry situation.  Laundromats hadn’t been particularly easy to find elsewhere but were nonexistent in Portoroz.  We were unwilling to pay a small fortune for laundry service so we purchased laundry soap and washed our clothes in the tub.  Our room came with an expandable drying rack so we were able to hang everything at once.  Portoroz was so hot that our clothes were all dry by morning.

Transit to Portoroz (August 17 2012)

Ralph again.  After breakfast, we caught the 11:50am train from Lesce back to Ljubljana.  Nearly all rail transit from one region of Slovenia to another requires a stop in the centrally-located capital; this is at worst a minor inconvenience due to the country’s small size.  We had purchased second-class tickets in the Lesce train station, and thought we were sitting in a second-class compartment on the train.  Indeed, the conductor stamped our ticket and continued on with no issue.  Later in the same 45-minute train ride, a second conductor came by, looked at our ticket, and angrily began shouting at us in Slovenian.  Clearly he thought we were not supposed to be sitting there, even though we were alone in the compartment.  Turns out, we were in first class, and this was unforgivable; we needed to move to the identical, yet second-class, end of the same railway car.  The original conductor (who spoke a little English) chanced upon us and spoke to the second conductor.  When the second conductor moved on, the original conductor gave a “sorry it didn’t work out” shrug.  We picked up our bags and moved about fifty feet down the railcar to the equally-deserted plebian [yet identical] second-class compartments.

When I researched our transportation options I found that Portoroz, our destination on the Slovenian coast, does not have direct rail service; the closest rail station is about 9 miles away and would necessitate a local bus to our final destination.  As such, I decided we would take a tour bus from Ljubljana straight to Portoroz to avoid another transit changeover.  The bus station in Ljubljana is conveniently located across the street from the train station, and thirty minutes after arriving in Ljubljana we were on a tour bus to the coast.

Slovenia’s Adriatic coast is minimal, only about fifteen miles long, and is heavily influenced by Italian culture both because of its proximity (Trieste, Italy is only a half-hour drive away) and also because it was once part of the kingdom of Venice.  No legends of mountain goats here; just a lot of pizza and casinos designed to lure Italians across the border (apparently, casinos are illegal in Italy.  There sure were a lot of Italian-plated cars all over Portoroz, maybe more than Slovenian-plated cars.)

When researching hotels on the Slovenian coast, there was only hotel that was reasonably priced and did not appear to be located within a shipyard.  The hotel website promised ocean views which, we soon discovered, is only possible one of two ways: 1) being located on the ocean or 2) being located well above the ocean level.  Our hotel was about a half-mile inland, so case #2 applied.  The land rises sharply from the coast, and we walked UP UP UP some impossibly steep hills, luggage in tow, attempting to interpret the Google Maps on the iPad. [The hills were so steep that the road we later primarily used to get back to the hotel had steps alongside it.  They were regulation height and maybe 3-4 inches deeper than typical home stairs.]

After a half hour, we came to the location where Google Maps placed our hotel – but nothing.  With both Lynnae and I drenched in sweat from the broiling Adriatic sun, we set down our luggage and I went on a personal expedition to find our hotel.  Indeed, Google Maps was wrong; but only by a little.  We walked a few minutes down a (mostly flat) road and checked into our hotel.

And it didn’t lie about the ocean views!  The room had a wraparound balcony, with grapevines growing along the railing.  While the hotel did not offer breakfast, its grapevines did supplement our daily fruit requirements.

View from our balcony

Upon arriving at the hotel we decided to spend a little time recovering from the haul uphill.  After researching our dinner options we ate at what Tripadvisor called “the best Mexican restaurant in Portoroz, Slovenia,” which, we must say, was better than a whole lot of Mexican restaurants in the US.  After buying a few breakfast food staples at a convenience store (sadly, it was late and the Mercator was closed) we took an unencumbered walk back uphill and called it a night.

Lesce / Bled Day 3 (August 16 2012)

Ralph here.  Because this was our last day in the Lesce / Bled area, we decided to use our rented bicycles to head back to Bled and see the sights there.  As I mentioned in a previous entry, Bled is primarily a spa and resort town, with two main sights – Bled Castle, sitting high above Lake Bled; and Slovenia’s only island, which is in the middle of the lake and has a church on it.

We biked into Bled and were unsure how to get up above the town to Bled Castle.  Lynnae had the reasonable idea to follow all the traffic that was headed in the general direction of the Castle, which proved to be the winning ticket – we soon faced an immense uphill that left us pushing our bicycles for nearly a half mile to the castle.

Bled Castle lit up at night

The island and church

Once we arrived at the Castle, we both rested for a bit at an outdoor terrace café and realized just how far up we really were.  [Not really surprising after our uphill climb with the bicycles.  Once on the castle grounds, we continued uphill on foot.  Also, the café had pretty good ice cream.]  The Castle is now a museum about the Bled area from prehistory until the forging of its identity as a resort town after a Swiss man named Arnold Rikli began touting the healing properties of its water in 1854.  Random Wikipedia fact: Bled is where the Yugoslav “benevolent dictator” Josip Tito had his summer residence in Bled.

Castle grounds

View of the countryside near the lake, from the Castle

Castle chapel

While we were touring the castle grounds, storm clouds began to gather over Bled.  We thought it might be a short shower, so we retired to the castle restaurant to eat some overpriced broth (I refuse to call it stew, despite the menu’s deception) and wait it out.  [We also ordered the cream cake the region is known for.  I’m not really a huge fan of cake in general but I was unimpressed.]  This was a losing strategy, and we eventually realized it wasn’t going to stop raining anytime soon.

[Other than the views, the castle was disappointing.  The museum detailing the history of the area was good but everything else was kind of meh.  It was all set up as shops.  For example, walk into a blacksmith’s forge; it’s a gift shop.  See the wine cellar; it’s a gift shop. There weren’t any demonstrations or displays, just wares for sale.  Of course, they also had the official gift shop.  I would have felt we overpaid but the views were pretty great and it was nice to rest after the long trek uphill.]

Because we were getting rained out, we decided to scratch the island and its church off our to-do list – neither of us was eager to get soaked rowing a boat out there, so we smoked the brakes on our rented bicycles and skidded our way back down from Bled Castle.  As the rain continued steadily, we rode to the tour company office and picked up a CD of photos from the previous day (included in our fee), returned the bikes, and sought refuge in the town bus shelter.  A local bus took us back to Lesce, and we walked the short remaining distance to the warmth and indoorness of our hotel.

[We were really fortunate that this was the only time the weather interfered with our plans.  We were especially lucky that we weren’t particularly attached to these specific plans.  However, it was quite cold riding through the very cold rain.  We were most definitely inappropriately dressed for the weather.  Hereafter we resolved to consult the weather forecast daily.]

After buying some groceries from the “Hofer” (ALDI) adjacent to the hotel, we ate dinner in our room and planned our next day’s travels to the Slovenian coast.