Rusty White, a van on tour

Our brief visit to Italy ended the next day, when we headed back into Slovenia for an even briefer period. We took a look at the small seaside town of Piran, which reminded my human of Venice quite a lot. With its narrow paths and slanting houses, it resembled the City of Canals up to exactly that point, no canals here. Fabulous! Pretty random but rather interesting nevertheless The small villages we visited on the Italian side as well as Piran here on the Slovenian side seem eerily deserted at this time of the year. Itˋs not as obvious in the bigger places like Triest and Venice, of course, but here you canˋt help but notice that the season is well and truly over, even the after-season.  If you keep walking from Piran to Bernardin, just a couple of kilometers down the coast, you get your first glimpse of Croatia. Looks kind of the same from here. After a quiet night spent high up on a hill with a great view down to the distant Adriatic Sea, with only a rooster and a cow and calf f...

We left Ljubljana in the direction of Bled, some 90km to the West. After a walk around the Lake Bled, which is the main attraction here and indeed very pretty, my human paid the Triglav National Park visitor center a visit to inquire about the conditions in the area. No, this is not the lake This is the lake (with the only permanent island in the country) She had planned to spend the next few days in the national park and the adjacent Soca Valley. This is where all the cool stuff in this country is, the highest mountains, the deepest valleys, the prettiest gorges. She had already ruled out climbing Mt. Triglav, with 2864m the highest peak in the country, for lack of proper equipment. But Mt. Vogel seemed to be a decent alternative. Or not. Due to the very heavy rainfalls in the last few days in this area, the mountain turned into a mudslide and the gentleman at the info center strongly advised against a climb. Also, it turned out, all the gorges were closed, as were some roads, includi...