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.
Our Random Travels 