I started, it won’t surprise you, with a run. A dinky 6k, as that’s the circumference of the lake, and I wasn’t going to do 2 laps. You can’t really drift off a bit without some steep inclines, so forget that. This suited me as my Achilles tendon is starting to bother me… hopefully nothing much, I think I need to replace my shoes as soon as I get home!
I grabbed the wherewithal for breakfast once the Mercator supermarket opened – very good croissants. The Vila Gorinka is a charming old building, and as stated, our balcony has an unrivalled view. But it’s self-catering, but the shared kitchen is low on amenities. Kettle: yes (a weird electric one with saucepan handle and spouts on two sides), any kind of coffee maker, cafetière etc: Heck no. Nescafé for us this morning.
For our last day at Lake Bled, we went first up to the nearby Toboggan Run – you take a chairlift up, then slide down a twisting metal tube on a plastic toboggan. Under 8s needed a grown-up, so I rode with G. It was fun!
We moved our bags over to the bus station and headed up to the castle. There was some grumbling giv8the effort and heat + humidity, but we yomped up no problem.
At the castle though, it was going to be 48 euros for all 4 of us to go in – fine if we were spending half a day there, but we really just wanted a coffee! 🤣 So we had some sweets from the bag, a swig of water and yomped back down again.
We had lunch at a decent place at the bottom as you get back to the lake – the only snag being the toasted sandwiches were basically double, i.e. 2 sandwiches per person. It would have been handy to mention this when we ordered – the chap’s English was certainly good enough. We have been guilty of a fair bit of over-ordering and hence over-eating or wastage – but it’s so hard when you’re eating a lot in restaurants. The ones that have kid menus basically just have a pasta dish and some variant of chicken nuggets and chips. And many don’t have that, so you have to piece together things that sound like they’ll work. Aurélie is amazing at doing this, and V is pretty easy going with what she’ll try, but G is not very adventurous, it’s fair to say. All restaurant menus should include a variation on: cucumbers, tomatoes, hummus/tzatsiki, ham and/or cheese, bread sticks or similar.
Inevitably, we went back to the lakeside beach thing fora bit of a swim and use of water slide. Only quick though as we wanted to be on the 3pm bus. We collected ice creams on the way and at the bus station, I got our bags out of storage (always scary to find that there’s no authentication in getting 5 bags that you assume are secure, no request to see a receipt, just point out which ones are “yours”) and as I came out, a bus to Ljubljana pulled in. “Well, we’d better be on that”, I thought. It was in fact the 2.40pm bus that was running a bit late (not surprising, the traffic was shocking coming into Bled), but of course we stashed bags and hopped on. However, there was unforeseen collateral damage – G didn’t have time to finish her ice cream and hadn’t even got halfway. 😟 We are now on a quest for the rest of the trip to find Trolls flavour ice cream. 🤞
The bus journey was uneventful other than the driver being on a constant conversation with a friend, maybe multiple conversations with multiple friends? For the entire hour of the journey.
At Ljubljana station, there are indeed lockers, but all the large and extra large were full and it was coins only, so we used our 4 euros to get a medium locker that fit our 2 big bags and 2 rucksacks into! We had to carry the other two into town, but that was ok for our whistle stop tour of Slovenia’s capital. Dragon Bridge, a look up at the castle, admire the river then cream cake (we hadn’t had this Slovenian delicacy in Bled – is basically a millefeuille but with one massive layer of custard with the biscuity pastry on top of a squodge of cream) and back to the station.
Bags recovered, we waited at the platform for our train… Oh my gosh, what a mess. Every other train we’ve caught has been more or less civilised. The one from Vilnius was a bit ambiguous due to the train in fact being two trains (with a change they sort of gloss over at Mockava), but the 1836 train to Zagreb was something else. A train rolled in, with a couple of carriages on. We had seat reservations (thank goodness!) although it was an all-second-class train. There was a guy on the tracks holding a hammer. As the train stopped, people of course got off, but several doors remained closed. A guard on the train indicated generally negative things but nothing in English, and even the Croatian-speakers were unconvinced by his words. So as soon as there was a chance, people started shoving onto the train wherever they could. The train still had people on. Now, we were keen to get on, but based on us having reservations in the carriage in question. Lad with hammer had been busy, as the locomotive had by this point been disconnected, so the train wasn’t going anywhere! Still people tried to pile on. As there were several voices speaking/complaining in English, I asked if everyone had seat reservations in carriage 271. The American-Croatian lady who had pushed on in front of me by inserting her family of 5 irritating children in first replied “yes, some people have”. An odd construction, but it made sense when an additional carriage was attached to ours and people, including the family in question, swarmed onto it like it was the last chopper out of Saigon. So that would be a “no, we don’t have seat reservations”. 😐
There still ended up being people stood in the corridor for the 3 hour journey. And fortunately there was plenty of time before our connection to the sleeper to Split. But our expectation that we’d at least be able to walk around a bit outside the station vanished. By the time we arrived, we were all knackered – the overbooked train also had no air con and no power sockets. My old phone held out for the girls to watch 3 episodes of Alexa and Katie and listen to some music, thank goodness.
At Zagreb station, it was hard to decipher what was going on. An arrival was due at platform 2 track 2 at 2204, and yes, the sleeper to Zagreb was showing as on time from the same place at 2230. Then the 2204 was delayed…and only when it arrived was it clear that it was the se train as the sleeper! It’s possible it was because they connected on the extra carriages, I guess. We had beds in carriage 20. Our mistake was to assume there was any kind of sequence to the carriage numbering! We looked in panic at carriage 3, 4, 2 before finding the train guard (who’d been on the train from Ljubljana) who led us past carriage 40 to carriage 20 on the end. The sleeper compartments had 3 beds each and I was happy to find that (as agreed over email) we had 2 compartments, with no-one else in the top bunk. The beds and pillow were comfortable, but like the Budapest-Ljubljana one, everything is VERY dated. The lights worked, but the fan didn’t, the window is a basic pull-down, as is the blind. And the power socket didn’t produce any power, even once the train got going. My power bank which had just been a heavy lump of ballast so far proved its worth!
Not an amazing night’s sleep but WAY better than the previous leg. The guard woke us up an hour out from Split and gave us water, apple juice, pretzel sticks and chocolate croissants. Not bad! We were all in pretty good humour when we arrived in Split about 7.30am.
Obviously too early to check in, so we decided to trundle towards our apartment along the seaside and keep an eye out for a place for coffee. This was not entirely successful – hefting the bags up and along the waterside was a little bit eccentric, and the bars on the way were either closed or starting to be cleaned of beer, bottles, cigarettes & urine ready for the day ahead. We stopped to eat some of our reserves and then got to the apartment to leave bags, then we headed to the beach. This journey took us via Firule tennis club which had a very nice café open and doing good trade. So we joined this rather swanky group of people for coffees before going down the steps to the beach and having a bit of a swim.
We killed a couple of hours there – the café had a bar (Mythos) next to it, so we had a drink there, but neither place did any kind of lunch. So we went to the apartment got in our room, changed, then summoned a Bolt to the old town.
EVERYONE in Split, especially cab drivers, bangs on about how bad the traffic is – there’s one road from east (where people live/stay) to west, where old town, bus, ferry and train station are all clustered together. Having lived in Wandsworth, I didn’t find the traffic too bad at all. 😉
Air conditioned cabs are life savers when it’s so hot, no two ways about it.
All the places we’ve been have old towns, but Split’s is another level – a big chunk of it is Diocletian’s Palace, actual stonework dating from 300AD that you can stroll around and buy ice creams etc. Our first priority was lunch and fortunately our first choice only had a table partially in the sun, so we went round a corner and found Perfection. Well, the restaurant was called Konoba Korta, but the setting was lovely, the service was pleasant, they had kids menus INCLUDING colouring-in and the food and wine was excellent. If restaurants had a twinning scheme like towns do, I would propose this could be twinned with our excellent local Italian, Sanzio. My seafood risotto was tip top.
A bit more of a stroll, then the heat dictated a return to the apartment (via Bolt once again) and we lounged by the pool, I washed some clothes then popped to the Spar to put together a little picnic we enjoyed with the last of the sunshine and watching Hungary-Sweden women’s handball.
A long & busy day!
Timsformational 