Three Eventful Days

I’m falling behind on blogging due to some eventful sightseeing and business days. After Piran on Tuesday, Uroš and I went back to Postojna on Wednesday, hoping to see the caves and the castle. We got a slightly late start, but arrived at Postojnska Jama (the caves) just in time for the 11am tour. There were several hundred people there already, but the line moved quickly and we were herded onto an amusement-park-style people-mover that whisked us through the first couple of kilometers of cave. Keep your head and arms inside the car, and we mean it! There was literally no safety mechanism for any idiot that decided to stand up or lean to the side or reach over his head. If the train happened to be entering a narrow passage or heading under a low overhang, you’d be toast.

Ten minutes later we arrived at a large cavern, disembarked the tram and headed toward a sign that said ENGLISH. Eventually a nice young woman in an official-looking red cloak picked up a microphone and began speaking a language I could understand. A group of twenty-five or so gathered around her and she began explaining the origins of the cave system. We walked up down and around for about a kilometer, viewing all kinds of great formations. Stalactites, stalagmites, ribbons, spaghetti, mushrooms, columns and more. The colors varied from yellow and pink to white with small bits of green here and there. There was a fair amount of black and gray also, due to soot from the torches of cave explorers and burns caused by soldiers destroying caches of petrol during WWII.

The final formation was a large white column that looked like a vanilla ice cream cone. Uroš seemed to think it tasted like one, too! After the walk, we got back on the tram and headed back to the entrance/exit of the cave. After a nice lunch, we intended to head to the castle near Postojna which is called Predjama Grad (castle in front of the cave), but it began raining really hard and we decided not to try it and headed back to the house.

That same evening around 5pm, some of our cousins from Grandma Louise’s side of the family came to pick me up for an evening of visiting. Before she came to the US, Louise was known by her Slovenian name: Alojsija (or Lojska). She had five siblings: Janez, Joze, Jozefa, Antonija and Marija. Their parents names were Janez and Helena Milavec. Louise’s sister Jozefa was about a year older than Louise and three of Jozefa’s granddaughters, Elka, Helena and Marija were my hostesses for the evening! Elka’s daughter Katja picked me up after she got off work in Ljubljana and we then picked up Helena and Elka and Katja’s two adorable daughters. We then headed over to Marija’s house in Grcarevec, near Planina.

Marija has two sons, Mitja and Aleš. They are my third cousins. Aleš was just coming in from work on the family sawmill when we arrived, so we all gathered around Marija’s kitchen table and drank šnaps and red wine and ate pršut, cheese, bread and pickles, all homemade. I brought out my old photos and we all peered at them trying to decide who was who in each. There was a lot of laughing and lively conversation. Katja did most of the translating and did it very well! Aleš seemed to understand a lot of English, and I am learning to understand a few words of Slovenian… words like oče-father, stara mama-grandmother, dobro-good, nasdravje-to your health, etc!

After a nice visit, we headed across the highway to the neighboring farm where we had a similar visit with Mitja’s family. Mitja is Marija’s elder son and was four years old when I visited in 1970. I have a photo of Mitja (or Mitko, as Grandma Olga called him) and me milking a cow together. Mitja’s daughter Judita greeted me in English. She is a lovely 24-year-old university chemistry and art student, and we all headed for the kitchen where her mother Irena put out more šnaps and red wine, plus pršut, cheese, bread, pickles, beef tartare and cookies. All homemade, and all really yummy! Irena’s sister Simona also joined us and as we looked at the photos we realized that not only were we related to Mitja through the Milavec family, but we were also related to Irena and Simona through the Urbas family! They are granddaughters of Antonija, Grandpa Andy’s sister! So that means that Mitja and Irena’s daughter Judita is related to us through BOTH family lines!

Well, as you can imagine, after an evening of this mind-bending relationship figuring, I was exhausted and ready for some sleep. But not before we agreed to meet again to explore the family cemeteries and homes as well as visit an elderly cousin of Olga, Teenie, Louise, Martha and Sophie, who lives in Ljubljana. This is scheduled for Saturday the 12th, so I will report on that later.

All of that was Wednesday. On Thursday Janez and I headed out early to visit a solar heating expert with a factory and experimental demonstration site near the mountains in the north part of the country. Janez has had heating systems in both his residence and his rental apartment go bad in the past month, so he is looking at replacing them both and trying to decide if he should continue to heat with oil or replace them with alternative systems. We had a nice visit with a fellow who is part heating system entrepreneur and part helicopter pilot. He showed us around his factory and sent us off with his promotional material. I kept wondering if I might turn his company into one of my clients someday – he needs all kinds of aerial photography for his brochures since part of what he does is deliver these big heat exchangers/tanks and solar panels to remote locations around Slovenia and the Alps. Interesting!

Since we were near the mountains, we decided to make a day of visiting some of the mountain sights that were on my list. We began with views of the highest mountain in Slovenia (Triglav) from the golf course in Radovlice and the old town of Radovlice.

Then we headed to the castle at Lake Bled, which is high up above the lake, on a cliff with beautiful views!

After that, we descended to the shore of the lake to see the pletna boats and the swans that live all over the shore.

And then it was on to Lake Bohinj and Savica Slap (waterfall). It was a steep 30 minute uphill hike, but the pictures are worth it! The video of the button-box player from the previous post was taken at this trailhead. Afterwards, we drove through a couple of old villages and stopped at a pizza restaurant with a view of ski slopes and cross country trails – this time of year, they are covered with grass and wildflowers. It was gorgeous and the pizza was really good! This is the first Slovenian pizza I have tried, and they use some unique ingredients – we had a “Mexican pizza” and they put large blobs of spicy cheese-whiz on each quarter of the pie, PLUS two extra large blobs of something like butter. Of course there was the regular sliced ham and salami as well as some type of regular cheese, so it really did resemble a pizza as we know it in the US, except for the blobs. Anyway, it tasted good!

Today we headed back to Postojna (Janez and I), to pick up the court order paperwork and post the public notice of intent to sell the forest. We also visited Predjamski Grad (castle in Postojna), since I missed it yesterday. It’s a beautiful castle, built around a thousand years ago inside a cave. As the fortress beacame larger, it outgrew the cave and now spills out the front of the cave. There is a really unique system of water collection and delivery inside the cave – they collected the seepage using a system of gutters and collection panels, then using gravity send it to all parts of the castle.

There is an extensive cave system behind and below the castle, so even when it was under siege, the enemy wasn’t aware of the secret network of tunnels the castle dwellers used to re-supply. Here is a photo of the surrounding countryside from inside and high up in the castle.

After the castle, we stopped in Podlipa to visit Joze and Valentina Brencic, cousins from my father’s father’s father’s family. We have more visiting to do and I hope to see more of them before my trip ends.

This weekend there are more birthday parties – Meta’s birthday is Sunday. Then Monday we meet with a possible buyer for the forest and the notary to negotiate a contract. Things are moving along and I am getting to visit with many people and see lots of interesting sights!