6/3/23
Day 10
Ljubljana
Hello everyone, we had our first successful day trip! No trip ups on transportation, location or any logistical errors.
Today we went to lake bled, a small lake tucked in the mountains north of Ljubljana. I said before that Slovenia was known for its beautiful lush green areas, this was one of those areas.
Luke and I got up to run to the grocery store to get food for breakfast and the lake day.
After breakfast and some planning we walked over to the bus station and got our ticket. It was only about an hour bus ride. Now I’m not very experienced with bus rides, nor the pricing behind the tickets. But the tickets were only 2 euros each… in my mind that’s is not too shabby.
Upon arriving in Bled, it’s a small sloping town leaning downhill toward the emerald blue water. Once you walk down the hill and can really see then lake is when it strikes you. For example:
There are three main structures on and around lake bled. The first is Bled Castle, it sits upon a cliff overlooking the lake. The second is the Saint Martina Parish Church, it sits behind the castle closer to the water. The last is the Assumption of Martina Church. This is located on an island in the middle of lake Bled.
The first thing we wanted to do was visit the church on the island. There was the option to get taxied over, but we decided to take things into our own hands and rent a boat ourselves. This is where the adventure began.
We arrived at the island and docked our boat to check things out. While walking around the island we saw some little fish, I asked if the boys thought there was anything bigger in the water. We walked a little and found a bigger fish. Repeat this process like 4 times until we came upon this school of massive catfish. These things were like 3-3.5 feet long.. we continued on to check out the church and that is where we had some gelato and met a Canadian man named Joe. Joe had been a butcher for most of his life but now he is retired and lives in Ontario, Canada. He no longer cuts meat and now he hangs with his kids and grandkids all day. He gave us some life advice, to explore and do things while we are young. We went our separate ways. Never to see Joe again. But the island was beautiful.
Our boat rental had a time limit of an hour and a half. It takes about 20 minutes to row the boat from then rental doc to the island. For some reason we decided to leave the island with 13:30 minutes left… We had to have set some sort of record for getting back across the lake. We were taking turns paddling as hard as we could, until we were gassed and then the next person would hop in, rinse and repeat.
We ended up making on time, even with people looking on from other boats at our immense and honorable struggle on that ship. This picture is us boarding before setting a Slovenian record.
After getting back we walked along the lake until we found somewhere to take a swim. We hopped in and swam around for a while. The water was actually not as cold as I thought it would be. Maybe 50 degrees.
4/8 eyes open…
We dried off and decided that we wanted to go to Castle Bled. Dispite looking very far away. It was only about a 30 minute walk. Once up there we got to have a sweet view and enter into the oldest castle in Slovenia, over 1,000 years old. Here are some pictures of our walk over and from the Castle on the cliff.
Oh and I forgot one thing. WE SAW JOE AT THE TOP. We called out to Joe and he said “boys! What’s up boys? I made it to the top, but they had to roll me up here. I might just have to have them roll me down.”
We caught one of the busses going back home and by this point we neeeeeded some food. We powered through our 2 pb&j sadwiches during the lake time. We ended up at a somewhat traditional american barbecue/ burger place. But this burger was one of the better ones I have ever had before.
After burgers, we went back to that bomb gelato place for some more. We walked home and Aydan decided he wanted to go out. In my mind we had the perfect recipe for sleep prepared. Lake day✅delicious dinner✅ gelato dessert✅ going back home ✅. It sounded like an obvious choice. But somehow I got roped into everything. But, the experience did not disappointment. We had lots of fun and we even met some professional Slovenian dancers, they were almost as good as us.
(They were much better)
