(Excerpts from my book OUR SUMMER IN SLOVENIA, Amazon.com) As I have noted before, a major factor in Elysee and I deciding to spend a summer in Slovenia, is it being excellently situated to enable side trips to other countries. It is possible to easily drive from Bled to Budapest in six or seven hours. In our case, being in no hurry, we took several days stopping overnight at Celje, Slovenia, visiting Maribor, Slovenia's second largest city (110 thousand) and then stopping overnight again in the Lake Balaton region of Hungary. From there we drove on into Budapest. The following day [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Slovenia via train from Graz. While there is no border crossing as both Austria and Slovenia are members of the EU, there was one thing we noticed immediately - the change of language! Suddenly we noticed that we had no idea of what people were saying or what the simplest of signs meant. When we arrived at Maribor railway station I had to give in to a call of nature and found myself standing at two doors, one labeled "Zenski" and the other "Moski" - luckily I could understand the pictures below the names! From that moment on [View Full Entry]

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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, [View Full Entry]

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Die heutige Fahrt hab ich mir mit Step geteilt, wobei ich den Anfang gemacht hab. Nach wie vor müssen wir uns ja an die StVO halten, weshalb wir dann doch weitestgehend sehr gesittet gefahren sind. Denn schließlich will man(n), nicht kurz vor Schluss aus dem Verkehr gezogen und dann auch noch mit Touristengebühren abgezockt werden. Aber wir wären nicht die fantastischen 3, wenn wir nicht auch dafür ne Lösung hätten. Die ist nun mittlerweile auch schon zum Patent angemeldet, also nicht einfach nach machen!!! So nun zur Lösung, wir haben einfach die Ösis vorfahren lassen. Einfach und geni [View Full Entry]

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Hello from beautiful Aurora; last week we arrived home after an uneventful trip from Vienna. I like uneventful trips, especially on planes. We had a fun last few days in Europe let me tell you about them. We were traveling with the Atwood’s, Mark and MG. Luke’s parents. We drove south from Vienna and turned east at Graz and found ourselves driving through rolling hills not unlike we see in east Multnomah county heading towards the Cascade range. In fact the terrain is nearly the same. If Mt. Hood suddenly emerged behind the hills to the east we would be in [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday I took a little drive with Reini to the border of Croatia. We had planned to drive at least 3 hours, and weren't very excited about that. The weather was really hot and humid, and Reini's air conditioner decided to poop out on us a week ago. Oh well, we said, for we needed to take the trip in order for me to be allowed to stay in Europe for another 3 months. The stamp in my passport from Croatia would be proof that I would be there for touristic reasons. I don't know if you'd call me a [View Full Entry]

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