Slovenia! (with a side trip to Venice)

After a fantastic week in Croatia and Montenegro, we were excited about going to Slovenia.  My parents had visited there several years back and only had good things to say about their time there.

Our first stop in Slovenia was the capital of Ljubljana.  Don't ask me how to pronounce it.  I think it may be pronounced like "Lyube-lyana".  All I know is that I mangled it a ton while I was there.  We stayed at a hostel during our time there, although we did have our own private room with two single beds.  There was a young Canadian kid, only a few years out of high school who was staying there as well who I started to chat up in the backyard of the hostel over some beer (a very Canadian thing to do).  It turned out he was currently living in my hometown of Oakville which was pretty cool.

We planned to stay three nights in Ljublyana, with one full day spent checking out the city, and the second day taking a day trip to Venice which was only a two hour drive away.  We cut our time in Italy short due our trip to Croatia, so we were glad we were going to be able to check out Venice.

We chilled out at the hostel the night we arrived and Sharon cooked us up a tasty dinner after a quick trip to the grocery store which was a short walk away.  After our standard wake up when we please morning, we hopped on a bus to take us into the heart of the city.

Sharon rocking it out in Ljublyana.

After walking around downtown for an hour or so, we decide to check out Castle Ljublyana which sits on a hill in the center of the city.  We could have waited to have a bus take us up the hill to the castle, but we decided to man up and walk up.  The walk wasn't too bad, and we spent a few hours touring around the castle and check out the museum there.

At the top of the castle tower with a great view of the city.

At the beginning of our trip, we had thought it would be fun to take a picture in each country we visited that was like a "Where's Waldo?" picture, but in our case, a "Where's Sharon?" picture.  We definitely failed miserably in doing this in every country we visited, but we did manage to take a few.  Here's one from Slovenia:

Where's Sharon?

We also came across a sort of amusing facial recognition thingy at the castle museum...

I present to you...Caveman Sharon!!!

On the way back from the castle we stumbled upon the coolest thing ever.  A giant milk / dairy vending machine.  Sharon and I were both strangely quite excited by this discovery.  There was both a area where it would dispense milk, and a more traditonal vending set up where you could get bottles of milk, flavoured milk, yogurts drinks, and even cheese sandwiches if I remember correctly.  I want one.

The invention of the century???  The super deluxe milk vending machine.

It does a body good.

On our way home, Sharon also made me take this picture of this certain video game character look-alike...

It'sa me, Mario!

The next morning we got up early (an extreme rarity for us on our trip) so we could get an early start on our day trip to Venice.  The drive was super easy.  The fact that you can drive between countries in the Eurozone without having to go through a checkpoint is awesome.  The only hassle was that we had to wait in line for parking at a parking garage for close to an hour, which was made worse by people who kept trying to bud in line.  It times like those that really make me hate people.

Anyways, once we finally got in the garage and parked, we made our way onto a ferry to take us to Venice.  Once there, it was around lunch-time, so our first priority was or course to find some delicious food.  I just followed Sharon, and she found us a delicious, yet expensive sandwich shop where we ordered three sandwiches to share, and some beer to drink of course.

Our lunch stop in Venice.

After lunch we wandered about the city and for the most part we were very underwhelmed.  It's a beautiful city, don't get me wrong, but it really just felt like a huge tourist trap.  Sooooo many tourists, so many shops, and not so great restaurants that were way overpriced.  I'm glad we got a chance to go there, but I am even more glad that we only did a day trip there.  One day was more than enough.

Here are a few pics from our day in Venice:

We made our way back to Ljublyana that night, and headed off in the morning to a small town called Beld that my parts raved about after their vacation in Slovenia.  Bled did not disappoint.  It's located around a small lake, and is extremely picturesque as the picture below will show.

The best part was that we just happened to show up for the start of the annual Bled Days Festival, which was centered around the lake and included musical performances, tons of delicious food vendors, fireworks, and the best part...wait for it...an airshow of old school planes.  Seriously, how awesome is that?!?!  I was very excited when I found out about this.  Sharon...not so excited.  Basically the whole time we were there, old school planes were zipping around above the lake, doing all sorts of stunts, and then on the last day there was a big competition.  Happy fun times for me, that'd for sure.

Yay for old school planes firing out tails of smoke.

While the best part of Bled for me was the airshow, the best part for Sharon, and a very close second for me was the food.  Here are just a couple of pics of some of the great food we feasted on while in Bled.

Words can't describe how amazing this meal was.

A nutella filled crepe. Simple yet satisfying.

Could Bled get any better???  Why yes it could.  And you know why?  There was a small casino in town that we went to a few times to play some video roulette, and some blackjack, where we won 100 euros to continue to fund our recent food gorging habits.

We stayed in Bled for three full days.  Unfortunately, it pretty much poured all day the second, so besides a trip out to a local Chinese restaurant for dinner, we pretty much stayed holed up in our room for most of the day which we actually enjoyed.  Unfortunately through, this was supposed to be the day we went to Triglav National Park for a hike which was supposed to be pretty awesome, so in hindsight, I'm pretty bummed we missed out on that.

The weather cleared up on our third and last day in bled, so we decided to take a walk around the lake.  Here are some sights from our walk:

Finally, somewhere in world where I don't have the worse fashion sense.

My one regret from Bled is definitely not going swimming in the lake.

"Crap, we got a flat.  Seriously, no one has a spare giganto tire tube?!?!"

Since we had arrived in Bled we had been eyeing this big long winding metal track you could ride down...

...so on our walk around the lake we walked by this and decided why the heck not.  It was a bit overpriced, but we did enjoy ourselves and the view from the top of the hill.

The view from the top of the hill.  Pretty spectacular.

Sharon locked and loaded for the ride down.

The next day we drove back to Croatia to drop off our rental car in Zagreb, and then the next day we hopped on a train to take us to Budapest.  

Before I let you go, here's a video that I took of the airshow in Bled.  I hope you enjoy it.

Croatia & Montenegro

Originally we had planned to visit other parts of Italy after our time in Rome, but we had had so many people tell us during our travels that we had to go Croatia, so we cut our time in Italy short and flew from Rome to Dubrovnik.  Croatia did not disappoint.  It was definitely one of the highlights of our time in Europe.

From the airport, we took a scenic 30 minute or so taxi ride along the coast to Dubrovnik.  We found our guest house with relative ease.  The guest house was the home of a nice older Croatian couple.  The only issue with the place was that our room didn't have A/C, but other than that it was fine.  It cooled off a fair amount at night, and we did have a fan in the room which helped a lot.

The view of the old town of Dubrovnik from our guest house.

Much of Dubrovnik is situated along a pretty steep hill which makes its way down to the sea.  As you can see from the picture above, our guest house was situated pretty far up the hill, so our walks down to the old town involved going down a lot of stairs, which in the heat of summer was pretty tiring.  Thank goodness for the buses that would take us back up the hill.  I think we took the stairs back up to the guest house once, and then opted for the bus the rest of the time.

We only spent one full day in Dubrovnik, and two somewhat sweaty nights.  The best part of Dubrovnik I think for both of us was the gelato.  There was this one flavour that was in a single word, awesome.  I wish I could remember the name of it.  It was basically some berry yogurt gelato, which doesn't sound that good, but let me tell you it was unbelievable.  We spent the rest of our time in Europe looking for it in all the gelato shops we came across, but we never could find it.  It is almost reason enough for us to go back to Debrovnik at some point in the future.

Pipes McGee savouring the best gelato I have ever had.

We walked around old town a fair amount while in Dubrovnik, drinking our fair share of beer, and enjoying some decent food along the way.  Towards the latter part of the afternoon, we relaxed for a bit on a beach that was a little bit down from old town.  Now the beaches in Croatia are some of the most beautiful I've even seen.  The one drawback to them is that they are all rocky / pebbly, and don't have soft sand, but the water is the clearest of blues I have ever seen.  They are breathtaking.

Here's the beach we rocked (no pun intended) in Dubrovnik.
A mediocre beach compared to others we saw in Croatia.

At this point in our trip, we had definitely entered the winging it stage.  The next flight we had booked wasn't until our flight home from Amsterdam that was over a month away.  We loved having this freedom.  Arriving in Croatia, we really had no plans where we were going to go next.  While in Debrovnik, we heard some great things about Kotor in Montengro which was only a two hour drive to the south, so we decided what the heck, let's rent a car and go to Kotor.

Crossing the border into Montenegro.

The drive down to Montenegro although brief, was one of the more beautiful drives I've been on in my life.  We followed the shoreline most of the way with it's crystal blue waters, and were surrounded by hills and mountains.  The picture below doesn't do it justice.

The view from the drive to Kotor, Montenegro.

Once in Kotor, we had some trouble finding the guest house where we were staying, so we had to stop in a few other guest houses to ask where to go.  Fortunately, one very friendly woman I talked to called up where we were staying and arranged for them to come meet us where we were so we could follow them back to where we were staying.  The guest house was pretty nice, although Sharon was a little more enthusiastic about it because of the owner's "very hot" son who frequented around the premises, quite often wearing no shirt.  She was very supportive of the decision to stay not one, but two nights in Kotor.

On our first night in Kotor, we strolled down to old town to check it out and grab some dinner.  While strolling around we came across an interesting display...

The way we were eating, we would probably fit into these by the end of our trip.

The next day we slept in of course, and then made our way back to old town for some lunch.  Outside of old town we came across a pretty cool food market that Sharon was pretty excited about.  Why you ask?

Cheese!  Lots and lots of cheese!

After sampling some cheeses and meats at the market, we made our way into old town and found a place to sit down for lunch, and enjoy some delicious, ice-cold beer.

A refreshed Sharon in Kotor's old town.

After lunch we made our way to the beach for a few hours of sun and relaxation.  Unfortunately due to the rocky nature of the beach, it wasn't the most comfortable, but definitely was pleasing to the eye.

At the beach, there was a dock that you could go down and jump off into the water.  A bunch of kids were having a ton a fun jumping and diving into the water so of course I had to join them.  The weren't just any kids too, they were Canadians that had come from the cruise ship that had docked for the day in Kotor.

Wahoooooo!

After the beach, we made our way to a grocery store to buy some food for dinner.  I'm pretty sure we made some pasta for dinner that night.  I also cooked up a bunch of hard-boiled eggs for snacking for our long drive to Split the next day.

Brown eggs.  Brownish-red Ted.

The next morning we went into old town to buy a fridge magnet, before heading back to Croatia to make our way to Split.  Leaving a country we visited without a fridge magnet was not an option as Sharon pointed out many times during our trip.  After getting back to the U.S. we were upset to find out we had a magnet for all but one of the countries we visited.  Somehow we had forgotten to get a magnet when we were in Thailand.  That or we didn't forget, and we lost it somehow.  I guess we'll never know.

The drive to Split was a little over four hours long.  It took us back past Dubrovnik, and we arrived in Split in the early evening.  I can't remember the name of the place where we stayed, but it turned out there were two hotels with the same name in Split, and the first one we stopped at was not the right one.  Our hotel was a little bit outside of Split, and since it was already evening, we decided to go to a restaurant recommended to us that was just down the street.  I think it was an Italian restaurant, but I do remember that the food was solid, and very reasonably priced.  The beer was good too.

The view from the restaurant.

Our hotel was just across the street from the sea, so in the morning before driving into Split, I took this quick picture of the beach in front of our hotel.  Just check out how clear the water is.  Crazy clear.

Split was definitely a beautiful city, but it didn't blow Sharon and I away by any means.  On the way to a lunch place that Sharon had read about online, we ran into a guy wearing a Princeton shirt who we chatted up a bit.  Nice guy, but he made us feel old as he was from the class of '06 or '07 or something. The lunch place we went to was good, but I can't remember the details.  Hopefully Sharon will be able to fill them in for me.  After lunch, we walked around Split's old town a bit more, and then we drove to a large public park we had read about.  We walked for several miles around the park, and found this really cool hang out place where they had taken this little inlet and made it into a public pool like area.  It was so nice, Sharon and I decided we'd come back the next day to hang out there for a bit before leaving Split for our next Croatian destination.

On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a grocery store to pick up some bread, cheese, and some sandwich meats which we had for dinner on our balcony, and used to pack our lunch for the park the next day.

The cool pool-like hangout in the park in Split.

Our picnic in the park.  BTW, orange Fanta in Europe kicks our Fanta's ass.

The next day, after hanging out in the park for a few hours, and enjoying our picnic lunch, we continued our Croatian road trip away from the coast and up into the hills.  We had read about a really beautiful national park called Plitvice Lakes National Park that we wanted to go visit.  It was about a two hour drive from Split, and we ended up staying in this really cute guest house in a town not too far from the national park.  The guest house was built only a year or two back, and was a great value.  Being up in the hills was a great reprieve from the heat of the coast as well.  I would say that the temperature was at least 10 degrees cooler.

The view from the balcony of our room.

Our host was a very friendly young woman, who made us feel very much at home.  We arrived fairly late in the day, and she recommended we go eat at the best restaurant in town (which was also owned by her husband).  Her recommendation was a solid one though, as we ended up eating there three nights in a row if I remember correctly.  At least two of the three nights we were there though.  The highlight of the restaurant was the slow-roasted pork...

Slow-roasted pork...yummy deliciousness.

It was soooo good.  We had to keep coming back for more.

Plitvice Lakes National Park was not a disappointment.  It is definitely one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to.  We originally had only planned to visit the park for one day, but the beauty of the park, and the lure of the slow-roasted park made us to decide to stay a third night so we could get an extra day in the park, and an extra belly full of slow-roasted goodness.

We walked around one half of the park on the first day, and walked the remainder of the park on the second.  Each day we packed a delicious picnic lunch, which helped fuel us for our two longs days of hiking.  Here are some pics from our two days in the park:

Working my ass off rowing our rented row boat while...

...her highness enjoys a tasty sandwich.

If you are ever in Croatia, definitely make the time to go Plitvice Lakes.  You won't regret it.  I'll also make sure to add the name of the guest house where we stayed at and the name of the restaurant with the slow-roasted pork.  Do it!

From Plitvice Lakes we made our may north up into Slovenia, but you will learn about Slovenia in the next blog post.  

Bye bye Croatia, hello Slovenska (aka Slovenia)!

It's never too late for Rome.

Well, so much for being prompt about finishing the blog, but better late than never I guess.  Why now you ask?  Well Sharon and I made a deal that if I got to keep the laptop while she was in Chicago for two weeks (to play video games while I'm in Seattle), I'd finish up the blog.  So here we go...

So we last left off on the island of Naxos in Greece.  We had to take a ferry from Naxos to Athens to catch our plane to Rome that afternoon.  Unfortunately our ferry came into Athens about 2 hours late, and we only had about an hour and a half until our plane was taking off.  With the airport a good forty minute ride away, we were starting to get pretty stressed out.  We hurried off the ferry and got into a pretty long cab line which took about 10 minutes to get through.  We get in our cab and started pleading with the driver to drive as fast as he could to get to the airport.  He said he would do his best, but when we told him when our flight was, he wasn't too optimistic about our chances.  It took about 15-20 minutes just to get out of the parking lot of the ferry terminal, but once we hit the highway the driver went to work.  He must have been going above 90 mph most of the way zigging and zagging through traffic.  Sharon had to close her eyes most of the way she was so scared.  With her eyes closed (thank goodness) I proceeded to watch the driver roll a cigarette with both hands while using his knee to continue weaving through traffic.  I was as much scared as I was amazed by this.  We got to the airport with about 40 minutes to spare, made sure to kiss the ground as we left the cab, rushed through security, and just made our flight with only a few minutes to spare.  And on to Rome we went...

We got into Rome fairly late that night, so we just checked into our guest house and went down the street for some Italian food.  I think I had set my expectations too high for what the Italian food was going to taste like it Italy.  It was good but I definitely wasn't blown away.

The next day we walked all over the city.  Early in the day, we came across a familiar sight from our recent travels...another Egyptian obelisk.

We meet again Mr. Obelisk.

 We soon turned down a street a got our first view of the Colosseum.

Throughout our time in Rome I think I probably took close to a hundred pictures of the Colosseum, and I'll share a few more with you later, but now we'll move on to something more important.  Lunch.  Sharon had done her research of course and had found this great little porchetta place that she wanted to us to check out.  It took a while to find it, but it was definitely worth it.  The porchetta was delicious.  We each had a sandwich to start, and it was sooooo good, we ordered another order of porchetta for the two of us.

A very happy Sharon after a delicious porchetta lunch.

Porchetta.  Yummy.

After lunch, we continued our self-directed walking tour of Rome.  Here are some of the highlights:

I don't think we'll ever be this tanned again.

"Itsa meeeee, Mario!"

"Hehe."

More delicious meat at dinner.

Sharon posing in front of the Colosseum.

On our second and last full day in Rome we had a busy day planned.  We slept in a bit as usual, and then made our way to Vatican City to visit the museum, and then St. Peter's Basilica.  After the Vatican, we made our way to the colusseum for a night-time tour thanks to my brilliant wife who was had done her research and was able to secure us last second tickets to this very popular attraction.  It was definitely the highlight of Rome for me.  Here are some pics from our second day in Rome:

The ceilings were definitely the highlights of the museum.

Beautiful wife.  Beautiful ceiling.

Waiting in line in St. Peter's Square.

St. Peter's Basilica.  Breathtaking.

Ted: "I need to get myself an outfit like that."

"Mr. Obelisk, you sure do get around."

Some well-deserved wine after a long, hot day at the Vatican.

The Colosseum at sunset.

Waiting inside the Colosseum for our tour to start.

Walking out into the arena.

Underneath the arena.

The view from the gallery.

Cheering Maximus on.

The pic my mature wife took of the sticker she stuck on my butt.

After our tour of the colosseum, we walked back to our guest house.  We had walked a ton that day, and unfortunately Sharon wasn't wearing the most comfortable footwear, so it was a long, slightly whine-filled walk back, but props to my wife for toughing it out.  I also have to point out she won our game of who could best estimate the number of steps back to the hotel.  Counting the number of steps back was a good way to keep her mind off the pain;)

So that was it for Rome.  Our next stop was Croatia, which was definitely one of the highlights of our trip.  Stay tuned...