May 3rd-8th – Lake Bled-Prebold-Ptuj

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Next morning D & J popped in to say goodbye as we were having breakfast - they were heading for the coast and we were off to Lake Bled. The drive to the town of Bled and the lake was only about 30km, which highlights one of the great things about Slovenia, it’s so compact. You could drive to just about anywhere from the centre at Ljubljana in couple of hours, unless you wanted to take the backroads of course which is what we often did. Lake Bled was beautiful and the Planet sums it up thus; “With its emerald-green lake, picture-postcard church on an islet, medieval castle clinging to a rocky cliff and some of the country’s highest peaks as backdrops, Bled seems too good to be true.” I’m not sure about the ‘too good to be true’ bit but it certainly was nice and the campsite was clean and well organized. They also had free wireless internet and as it was getting near the end of our travels I thought I had better try and get up to date - so please excuse the rush around that time. We spent 3 nights at the lake, we walked around it twice and up the hill (Jac said it was a mountain!) beside the campsite. I also walked up the hill to the castle by myself which was lucky as it turned out, as on the way down I came across my first wild snake sunning himself on the track. He was about a meter long and I managed to take a couple of photos before he slithered away and Jac thought that was bad enough! The lake itself must have been about a kilometer long and it looked well set up for rowing races although there was nothing happening at the time. Like every other campsite we’ve stayed at this year, the busiest part about it was the maintenance staff preparing for the high season, it meant that we never had any problems getting in and it also made it a bit cheaper. We left the lake on another beautiful day heading east along the backroads again. Ljubljana sounded like a nice place but we decided to forgo a walk in the city in the hot sun for a drive in the country. Our next camping ground was at Prebold which is a little town in a wide valley which looked like it specialized in growing hops, there were fields and fields of them. Our campsite was not much more than the owner’s back yard and we were the only ones there, but the amenities were spotless and the family very friendly which made it quite cosy. We enjoyed a couple of beers while reading through their visitor’s books dating back to 1964 when they called it Yugoslavia (which it was until 1991), there were even a number of Kiwi entries - it was most interesting. One place that was mentioned in the books more than once was a town called Ptuj (pronounced P’tui) which was sort of on our way back to Austria, so the next day we decided to visit. It turned out that Ptuj is the oldest town in Slovenia and it also turned out to be a really nice little place next to the Drava River. After all the grand churches and monuments we’ve seen it was nice to walk around this friendly little town. It obviously had a lot of history, it had its 1000 year old church (St Georges), its town hall and monuments (the monolithic Orpheus Monument for the first major of Ptuj from the 2nd century), but it was all so unpretentious and un-touristy and had a really nice feel to it. When we left we camped on the other side of the river, our last night in the bus, and it was a nice night.
Next morning before we left we were very busy trying to organize all our gear - what stays with the bus, what comes home with us, what gets sent home and what gets dumped. We are flying Ryan Air to the UK (€5 per person plus check-in fee, plus baggage fee, plus taxes) and we expect they will be strict on baggage allowances. (Notice the change of tense? It must mean I am up to date - woo-hoo) We also have a dialema - our Visa cards are not working and we don’t know why! Hopefully we can sort it out quickly. Anyway, we still had a bit of cash when we left Slovenia and made it safely out of the country and back into Austria.

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