Road Trip!

We discovered Bled, Slovenia 12 years ago when attending an annual meeting.  

On Tuesday of last week, we hopped in the car for a road trip with our friend Kristi & her son, Eli following behind in their car.

Many Americans may not know about this little European treasure! Slovenia is a part of former Yugoslavia.  Our first visit to Bled was for an annual meeting we attended 12 years ago in 2000.  We'd been in Russia for 8 months and the trip was our first visit outside of the country.  It was a refreshing escape from the heaviness of living in Russia.  Bled is located in northern Slovenia, close to the Austrian border.

A town with a lake, 15th cenutry church on a small island in the middle, cliff with a castle surrounded by mountains.  Breathtaking!!

However, getting to Bled this day turned into a little bit of a nightmare.

Here's how it went.

*Stopped for lunch.  Reegan had a poo accident.  Then learned Eli had an accident  This did not set a good tone for the rest of our trip.  Kristi was already feeling ready to turn around and head home!! 

*On the road after lunch and our gps had us veer off the highway onto a different highway taking us through several small towns and adding time.  Grr!  Remember to update the gps before a road trip!

*Jerry was pulled over going way over the speed limit.  Oops!  This did not help my already grumpy mood for this trip!  Luckily, here you pay on the spot and the fee, in this instance, was minimal.

*Made our way back to the highway and almost to Slovenia when we got to the Austrian/Slovenia border crossing and wouldn't ya know......it was blocked.   The tunnel going through the mountains from Austria to Slovenia was closed for the day.  Great!!!


*Two cars and a motorcycle pack stopped to ask us what we knew about an alternate route (all were also foreigners from varying European countries and couldn't read the signs in German.  Way to go Austria!!!)  We explained and researched as best we could. Hopefully we didn't lead them too far astray.

*Our alternate route?  A steep and winding mountain road.  Luckily it was good and clear.

  

This little mountain excursion added over an hour to our trip, with a few extra minutes here and there trying to avoid the highways since we didn't have a vignette (highway permit) for Slovenia, bringing our total hours traveled to 9 hours!!!  We should have made it in 4 hours!!

Several times I had to remind myself that, at least, the view on this lengthened road trip was nice!

We made a quick stop to pick up of the keys to our holiday home at a gas station, made our way to the lake in Bled, oooh and ahhhed over the view......

....and went straight to find food and found ourselves at a nice little pizzeria with some tasty pizza!!

I must say that our kiddos all traveled quite well and got to bed late!!  But we all survived!!