I said yesterday we might just visit the castle before we left Bled in the morning. That’s what we did.
Had a nice breakfast (after a lousy nights sleep – Tito has no air conditioning and his curtains are threadbare) and checked out, then drove up to the Bled Castle. Having hiked up to many a castle on this trip (or taken a funicular), this time we drove to the parking lot right at the castle entrance. And we were early enough – before all the tours arrived in Bled – to get a parking spot and visit the castle before the hordes arrived. It’s a fairly small castle, with a small museum contained within, so it didn’t take us too long to visit – maybe an hour in total. Then off to our next location.
Lake Bohinj is supposed to be the poorer cousin to Lake Bled. It’s only about 30 minutes or so down the road and further into the alps from Bled, so other than the snaking traffic train for a portion of it, we got there relatively quickly. And it really is a bit of a poor cousin. The town at the edge of the lake is not very scenic, and the drive along the edge not much so either. It is a much bigger lake than Lake Bled so while you can make a hike around it, it can take 3 hours or longer. And it was raining. So rather then spend time at the lake, we went to the mountains (again).
At the far end of Lake Bohinj there is a cable car that goes to the top of Vogel mountain. It’s a ski area here in the start of the alps. We parked the car and rode the cable car up the mounting in driving rain and wind. At the top, we beelined it for the cafeteria before it could fill up with the others from the cable car up, and just got ourselves a table. It was almost lunch time so we ordered a mountain lunch (stew and soup) and had a leisurely eat hoping the rain would let up. And the mountain gods were mostly good to us, as when we were finished there only occasional light showers, mist, and some sunny breaks. Enough for us to have a bit of a walk around the base of the hill, and for Lisa to feed an Alpaca. Then we headed back down the way we came up.
It was still too early to check into our next hotel (which is about 10 minute drive from Lake Bohinj, so we had a stop, walked over the bridge at the end of the lake, and had a gelato. The rain came and went.
That was pretty much it for the day. Since we hadn’t slept well the night before we had a bit of a snooze once we checked in, did some internet updating, had dinner at the hotel restaurant, and called it a day. Tomorrow we say goodbye to Slovenia as we make our way back into Austria, with our destination Salzburg.
Final thoughts on Slovenia? It is a small, beautiful and geographically varied country. People are quite friendly, and embarrassingly versed in at least two other languages than their mother tongue, English being one of them. And as we wished for, relatively un-touristed. For now.
