What a day… I left the hotel in Skradin shortly before 10, knowing that I had a pretty long day in front of me. From the very first minute the weather was stormy and the sky was dark. I hit the highway since I knew that I’m not gonna be able to take any pictures anyway. It turns out, that was a mistake. Most of the highway has a variable speed limit which adjusts with the wind speed, so I spent about 40 minutes driving on a highway limited to 40km/h because of the wind. That was pretty much the maximum you were able to drive though, since you were just thrown from the left to the right side of your lane… Not a fun time.
I left the highway to visit Plitvička jezera, the national park where the movie Treasure of the Silver Lake was filmed, which is one of my early childhood memories. I assumed it would be similar to the Krka national park - some tourists and that’s about it. I arrived to two huge parking places full of buses and hundreds of cars. Still hoping to snap a few pictures I parked my motorcycle and walked across the bridge over the road. On the other side there was a queue of about 45 to 60 minutes to pay the entry fee. So even though this should be one of the most beautiful places in Croatia, I had to leave again, since I couldn’t spend 3h for a few pictures which wouldn’t even have been any good because of the weather. Maybe next time…
Speaking of the elephant in the room: The weather continued to be absolutely miserable. Temperatures in the high single digits and rain, followed by 5 minutes of storm without any rain. Only once I reached the border to Slovenia the weather cleared up a bit. In my head, I was already writing today’s blog post. On why I don’t have any real content and would have gone to sleep in a random hotel in Novo mesto, probably drunk.
I arrived at the city and looked for a hotel. Then I spent 15 minutes in very heavy traffic trying to reach it. That’s the point when I just went to the roadside and made the decision to stay somewhere else. I opened up google maps and picked a random hotel nowhere near any city at all…
It took me about 20 minutes to find it. It’s a vineyard on the top of a hill. In the end I did arrive. My clutch was telling me that it doesn’t like hill starts. I quickly walked around the building and nobody was here. Great. While I was looking for a new place the stay the owners arrived.
They showed me the room and invited me to a few glass of their own wine as well as some of their home made Salami. Communication with them worked only through google translate, since they didn’t speak a word in English and my Slovenian was limited to Thank you, Good day and Cheers. After we got to know each other a bit, the Mayor of the town and his wife joined us. He was fluent in German and English from his work at the ministry for tourism.
They all invited me over to a local restaurant which makes suckling pig. So I joined a round of 7 locals, eating and drinking heavily and it only cost 10€ in the end. The view from this place however is absolutely gorgeous. I’m so looking forward to tomorrow morning, when I can enjoy this view in the morning sun…
