Slovenia's Lake Bled and Lake Bohinj

     When Slovenians want to escape the day to day grind, they go to Lake Bled and Lake Bohinj for a fun week or weekend.  Both are picturesque lakes . . .  below photo is Lake Bled.

Close-up view from another location of that crag in photo above . . .

This is a church on Lake Bled's more remote shoreline.

 My sister Vicki visited an island on the lake via a tourist rowboat.

   Instead of joining Vicki, I visited with a friendly solo swan on the lake. It tugged on my shoe with its beak . . . like "Hey you, aren't you going to feed me bread crumbs?"

I didn't have any food on me, and it eventually swam away with a webbed foot resting up high on its back, hmmm??? Is this sort of like giving someone the finger?

Gorgeous sunrises on the lake. One early morning in a grassy vacant lot I saw a female Alpine ibex!

I took a fuzzy bad photo of it, thinking it was a deer but then later after looking at the photo on my sister's iPad and seeing those horns, we realized it was a female ibex! There's a statue in the village of a female Alpine ibex (males have larger horns).

It amazes me that most rural Europeans (in France, too) heat their homes with wood. We saw many, many wood piles, the one below was obviously stacked by an organized homeowner.

Below is Lake Bohinj . . . it's a dead-end road to this lake because of the beautiful ring of mountains (Triglav National Park).

We rented a kayak for half a day on the lake . . .

Lake Bohinj has two little villages and many farms . . . they bring their cows home on the road. Twice we saw cows being herded down the road.

Unbeknownst to us, the 62nd annual Cows Ball was being held a couple miles away the next day!

We visited the Church of Saint John the Baptist, built in the mid-11th century.

Inside and outside are frescoes; they're restoring them from various periods.

Simple beautiful windows . . . 

 While we were at Lake Bled, we took a shuttle to the Vintgar Gorge, beautiful clear blue-green water, the Radovna River.

 

It has a long boardwalk built in 1893 that hugs the canyon walls and frequently criss-crosses the river.

Wonderfully scenic gorge . . . the 126 year old boardwalk (repaired occasionally) is amazing.

At the end of the boardwalk is Sum Falls, almost 50 feet high.

But unfortunately, we wouldn't be able to go to the Cows' Ball because we had an un-reserved train to catch in the nearby itsy bitsy village of Bohinjska Bela. No busses, no taxi's, we had to walk on a narrow country road to get to this train station. In fact several times Vicki stopped on this lonely rural road (almost no traffic), and said, "I don't think we're on the right road". It sure didn't look like we were headed to a train station, look at those mountains! "Are you sure you got the right address?" I asked.

It's amazing how Vicki finds these little gems in our travels. I took the above photo at the train station. There were NO tourists there, just a handful of seemingly local folks.

At the tiny no-service (but charming) train station, we read a bulletin board that explains this train goes through a tunnel (four miles) made mostly by hand between 1901 and 1904!! Wow! And then here comes the train!

Only two cars! Looking like it's ready to board Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band . .  . .

And what a scenic wonderful ride! Twice we stopped at a little village so the train conductor could take a smoke . . he stood there smoking outside and we passengers waited for him to finish his cigarette. Couldn't believe it! Only in Slovenia . . . and by the way, that train was over an hour late when we first boarded at Bohinjska Bela, most likely because of the train conductor's frequent smoke breaks.

It was a gorgeous ride! I am ready to do this one all over again.

     Map explanation below shows Lake Bled, then a bus to Lake Bohinj, then a train with a tunnel through the Mount Kolba mountain range (part of Triglav National Park) and with amazing mountain and valley views all the way to Sezana (very near Trieste, Italy at the northern most part of the Adriatic Sea). Our destination is Slovenia's famous Lipizzan horse stud farm. From Sezana, a reserved taxi is waiting to take us to the farm . . . 

A surprise is waiting for us at the farm :)