Lake Bled, Slovenia

The drive from our house to where we were staying in Croatia (Rovinj) is 8.5 hours, without traffic, tunnels, construction or stops - so we decided to overnight somewhere along the way... Luna just doesn't last that long in her carseat, back there all by herself! So we picked Bled, Slovenia because it is 5.5 hrs from home, which is more than half way, so that we would have an easier go of it on Sunday.

So we made our way out of Germany and into Austria. The drive through Austria is gorgeous, on highways that are feats of engineering, perched as if cantilevered into the side of the hill. And they offer a great view of all of the dairy farms that look as if you could imagine the yodelers out in the fields, near the farm houses clinging close to the mountain tops. We talked about how cows must get tired of always standing on such a steep hillside - for their grazing pastures are sheer slopes, high above the highways.

To pass through the Alps in Austria we must have gone through at least 10 tunnels - and seriously long ones, like 7 km! Two of them were undergoing construction, and because they are so long, they have to control how many cars pass through them at a given time - if there were an accident, and people had to evacuate quickly, it could easily turn into a death-trap, so incoming cars were regulated from each side and added an hour of standing in stop-and-go traffic to our trip.

But we still managed to make it to Bled by about 3:30, thanks to our 8am start time!


Bled sits in a cradle of the alps and boasts a glacial lake. Perched on a rock above the lake is the iconic Bled castle, and out on an island in the middle of the lake is the home to the Assumption of Mary Pilgrimage Church. It is extremely picturesque, and the color of the water in the lake is a stunning teal blue, due to the white stone and sand lake bed. My pictures do it no justice. The architecture is still very alpine, but with a distinctly Slavic or Eastern European flair.



The shot below almost captures the color of the water in the lake...

There are a small fleet of these wooden boats on the lake to ferry people around...

This is where we had an early dinner - which was top notch, enjoyed it thoroughly! Very good steaks.

A sot inside one of the boats, each one had its own painted symbology near the prow, this one of two swans...

Upon entering Slovenia, we began to notice that there were many old buildings that had fallen into disrepair, and were just left to stand and decay - something you just don't see in western Europe - they would either tear it down or restore it. This theme would continue all through our trip. In the picture below you can see the top edge of a ruined villa, which was commonplace. It seems a waste - but also bore a strong sense of an un-developed charm I've never seen elsewhere.

The hotels on the far side of the lake.

Luna started making friends our first day away - a trend that would continue the whole vacation...

Examining the topography of Lake Bled.

Ice Cream! A new favorite!

The view from our hotel balcony at night(below)... and now it's time for a bedtime story...

After we got Luna to sleep, Bas and I laid down and started reading our books. At some point, Bas got up and went to the loo. On his way back, he exclaimed "There's a bat in here!"

How appropriate - our first night in a Slavic country, and a bat, like Dracula, shows up on our bedroom floor! I'm thinking it must have been injured already, because it was just kind of lying there and flopping around, and although we had our balcony door opened, we had the sheers pulled closed - so I have no idea how it ever even got in. It was about 8 inches across with full wingspan, had a really furry little body (I've never seen a bat in real life in full light, so I have to describe it in detail!) and the wings were so thin and leathery.

We quickly realized that we had nothing to scoop it up with, and given that bats carry so much disease, we didn't want to mess with it. So Bas called downstairs and told them we had a bat in our room - of course they thought that we were saying "bed" and were like, well - no duh.

Finally a guy came upstairs with a broom - but by that time that 8 inch wide bat had managed to fold itself up so small that it could crawl into the space between the carpet and the baseboards along the wall! When the hotel staff member finally got up there, he didn't believe us that it was a bat, apparently that had never happened before - and tried to tell us it was a big bug!

At any rate, they gave us a new room for the night, and let us leave our stuff in the original room, so that all we had to do was move Luna. I think we finally convinced him by the time he left us that it was actually a real bat, and that they needed to get it cleaned up before the next guests came - but who knows!

So now you might understand how the view below is somehow, so appropriate!

And in a better light, in the morning...

And on a funnier note - this is what our hotel-provided hair dryer in Slovenia looked like... somewhat more like a big elephantine probuscis than a hair dryer, right? Or perhaps a wall attached Hoover?