Vitner Gorge and trip to Austria

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Just to the north of our village is Vitner Gorge. The river is probably 40 metres from the top of the gorge and there is a walkway that criss-crosses the river. The spray from the cascading water filled the air. The walk went for about 2 kms. The water was extremely clear and quite a few fish could be seen. Bled is only about 35 minutes from Austria. It was too good an opportunity not to cross the border for the boys. So after returning to the entrance to the gorge we drove drove on a country road north to the motorway that runs from Ljubljana into Austria. The motorway itself is a two lane each way dual carriageway with a 130km/hr speed limit. It has a 7km tunnel under the mountains which pops out into Austria. We drove to the nearest town which was Villach. We found near the main square a typical Austrian restaurant. The differences in cuisine with neighbouring Slovenia were quite stark, with much more meat in the diet and most people were drinking beer at lunchtime. Evan did get have sausage which he missed after so much pasta and pizza in Italy. After lunch we went to the main square to look at the shops and the local church. The city itself had been badly bombed during World War II but the main church had survived and dated back in parts to the 16th Century. Rhonda was able to find a nice warm coat suitable for going out in Canberra winters, Evan found a new German board game called Village, while Dion an auxiliary cord to enable his tablet to be played through the hire car stereo.We then headed back to Slovenia with Dion doing the navigation on his tablet. We had to wait about twenty minutes at the tunnel entrance as it was one way whilst road works were underway. Everyone was pretty tired and so we had a home cooked meal at the apartment that night and prepared for our return to Ljubljana.

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