Another Drive Through Mountains

Another Drive to Slovenia

April 23
Written April 26

Dear Friends and Family,

My morning photo shoot was fun and now we would see if we could have more good luck. Marianne and I set out with two goals: show her some mountain scenes similar to those I'd seen in the morning and have a good Slovenian meal, whatever that is.

For the first goal, I'm afraid we struck out. By the time we drove up near where I'd been in the morning, the clouds were thick, blocking the mountain tops and rendering everything else an uninteresting gray. On to goal #2, an ethnic meal.

For this trip we drove up through the Seegbergsattel Pass, the smallest of the Austria-Slovenia connections we would try. Again, we were impressed by the twists and turns, glad that we were off-season. In ski or summer vacation times, crowds would make this trip much less pleasant, I'm sure.

Crossing into Slovenia was uneventful, not even a stop for the "vignette" road pass we had needed the week before. (In hindsight, I realized our seven-day road pass had expired, but I didn't tell Marianne until we had completed our excursion. No sense in both of us worrying about going to road pass jail in Slovenia.)

Our first stop in Slovenia was in Jezersko, at a very inviting hotel. The dining room looked crowded, so we figured we'd found the right place for our local treat. Wrong. The restaurant was apparently so popular that they had sold all the food they had prepared! Darn. However, the waiter made a suggestion for a restaurant 20 kilometers away that he said offered some of the best Slovenian food around.

We re-tuned our navigator and headed out. Unfortunately, when we got to the recommended spot, hungrier than ever, we discovered that Monday was the restaurant's day off. Darn again. At this point, our hope was that we would see a charming Slovenia restaurant along the road back into Austria. Here again, we had no success. We actually saw a few inviting restaurants, but all were closed.

Even our fall-back on the Austrian side of the border, Guest House German Peter, was closed for the day. So, in the end, we settled for pizza, a few kilometers from home. Maybe because we were starved by then, or maybe because our diet had not allowed pizza for months, it was pretty tasty.

So, did we do anything on this Slovenian trip except look for food? Not much, but we did get another impression of Slovenia, a positive one despite the lunch struggles. Up in the mountains, the scenery matched anything Austria had to offer. Down in the more urban valleys, the country looked reasonably prosperous, maybe not Austria-prosperous, but certainly more prosperous than the term "Eastern Europe" sometimes conjures up. (For us anyway, the term reminds us of our Eastern European stay ten years ago, so maybe that's not fair.)

More importantly, our few encounters with local people were positive. English was common enough, as were smiles. It's all we can hopee for from a new-country visit.

Regards,

John and Marianne

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