A day off in Slovenia

 A typical sLOVEnian scene.  Even the roads show the romance in the air.

We actually drove slightly into Austria to get to this place.  More on it later - I want to keep this chronological.

We have both been busy as a dog in a flea circus.  Trouble is, we have days where our schedule is crazy full and sometimes one of us has to represent us while the other attends to some other duties.  A lot of this is simply due to the fact that I am the only councilor in the newly-combined branch.  The branch president lives 40 minutes north of Maribor and the other half of the branch is 45 minutes south, in Celje.  So we have been assigned to attend the Celje branch most of the time.  The Branch President even suggested that we move there, but we said, "No."  We'd rather drive back and forth.  If the Mission President steps in (and why would he?) then we'd have to go.

Liz is heavily involved because we are also just starting church meetings again.  We have only been having District-wide Zoom for the greater part of the past year.  Now we need to have our own meetings, including the Sunday School, priesthood, YM/YW, and Primary.  Liz is the de facto planner for several of those groups, and we are glad to have her help.

So, some days are crazy, jam-packed with all sorts of things we have to do.  But then there are days when our schedule is wide open, and we crave a chance to get out and get away.  Most of what follows is the result of those days.

One day we had an afternoon off and decided to walk up to the awesome city park.  Liz wanted to climb the little mountain and see the tower there, but I protect my knees these days and I begged off.  While she went up the steep part of the hill, I walked up a slight incline to the lakes.

I took my camera so I could practice photos where the subject is clear, but the background fades away.  This pretty little iris growing at the edge of the lower lake, for example.  

This is an example of what happens if you don't do it right.  The pretty rhododendron doesn't stand out and just kinds of blends into a flat photo.

I saw some ducks walking down the path toward me, so I stepped aside and got out my long-lens to photograph them.  

I kept shooting as they got closer and had time to notice that she has a blue patch on one side, but not the other.  

"Dimorphism?" I asked myself.  But I finally concluded she is just hiding her colors except where a feather is missing.

We had lunch at the restaurant by the lake and I wondered what this comic character represents.  As I looked at it, I finally noticed that what looks like flames must be water and there are horsemen in it.  I had to know what it said!  Enter Google Translate:

"A shoemaker disguised as a Turk, opens a lock at the three lakes and drains water into city ditches, thus rescuing Maribor."  This must have happened in the 12th century when the Turks were turned back from Austria and Yugoslavia.

While we had lunch, it started to rain and we ended up getting soaked.  But we had things to do that afternoon, so that was the end of a morning off.

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Next time we had a day off, it was all day.  Liz just wanted to get out, so I suggested we go to the famous stork swamps in far NE Slovenia.  As we approached, Liz noticed a city she is familiar with - Murska Sobota.  She visited a member who lives there, and knew a beautiful church.

It is a Lutheran Church.  This corner of Slovenia was long a part of Hungary and only became part of Slovenia after WWII when the Russians "liberated" it.  They gave it to Tito to thank him for continuing to be communist.  More on that later.  We went inside and saw the beauty of it.

The altar and the stained glass above.  Notice the drapes on the wall behind and on the sides of the altar area?  They are painted on.

It is strange to us Mormons to see an antique organ in the choir loft, surrounded by modern trappings like drum set, electric keyboard, and sound mixing equipment.

A monument to the Russian Liberators.

WWII was hard for all Europeans, but this is a truly sad story.  After Hitler annexed Austria and swallowed up Poland, many Eastern European countries joined the Axis to protect themselves, including Hungary (which included this area) and Croatia which was an independent part of Yugoslavia.  So, it came under German control and that wasn't pleasant after they learned that Hitler dispised Slavs almost as much as jews, so they withdrew from the Axis.  Naturally, Germany invaded and conquered them with little effort.  Slovenia was part of Croatia then, and Croatian leader Tito was communist, so he resisted Hitler, although the Nazis remained in control.  Then the Russians came and pushed the Nazis out, and Tito became absolute leader of all Yugoslavia, and the Russians gave this region to him to be part of Croatia.  After Tito died, Slovenia wanted to be independent and declared it, and got it, and this region came with them.  Croatia followed suit, so Serbia (which had control of the Yugoslav army) attacked just like Abraham Lincoln, to protect the union.  That dissolved into a bitter period of Civil war, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and chaos, so the UN (us) stepped in and stopped it.  Then, Croatia got their independence, as did Bosnia and Montenegro and Kosovo.  But this little piece of what used to be Hungary remained in Slovenia.  I didn't see any signs of displeasure, but what do I know?  I don't speak the language.  The point is, that each of these political shifts had protesters who were rounded up and executed.   The Nazis hung people in the town square or shot them outside town.  The Russians just shot them where they stood.  Tito was quiet about it.  Now, they appear to be very happy with life - it's safer.

When we left town, we headed further east for 20 minutes or so to the little village of Velika Polana at the edge of a bird refuge.  As we got close we saw lots of stork nest poles.  A hundred years ago, people built chimneys with a flat stone on top to keep out rain.  Storks loved those flat stones and built their nests on them.  People believed the storks brought them good luck.  The fly in the ointment was that stork nests can sometimes weigh up to 2 tons, which is hard on chimneys.  So, in the last hundred years they compromised by setting up poles with platforms on top for the storks.

This stork is standing on a very small nest.  They are usually as tall as the stork's legs.  This one was preening - cleaning itself up from the mud it gathered in the fields.

This is a more typical nest.

The storks spend the winter in Africa and return to Southern Europe to nest and raise their chicks, early in the spring.  When the chicks are ready, they fly North to the lush areas there and spread out for the summer and fall.  We saw quite a few, but they are the stragglers.  Most of the poles have been cleaned off for next year, already.

This one was harvesting the most delicious bugs so it will be nice and strong for the flight north.

After we left the stork area, we drove west and north.  Our goal was the heart road, that romantic hillside that all the young sister missionaries pine to see.  It is on the very edge of Austria.  I fell asleep, and with no navigator, Sister Ashurst drove a little too far.  I woke up just in time to see a road sign and the top line said AVSTRIA, but I wasn't very awake.  There was a rest stop there, so we stopped to buy gas.  When I went in to pay, the clerk noticed I am not from around here, and he asked me what we are going to see in Austria.  I said, "What?  We aren't going into Austria!"  He laughed and said Austria was 200 meters farther along the freeway.  These rest areas do not have access to get off the freeways, so we had no choice but to continue.  We stopped for the border guard and I explained that we didn't want to enter Austria, we just wanted to turn around.  He smiled a little and asked for my passport.  When he saw it, he said "Oh, AMERICANS!" like that explained everything!  Then he pointed out where we could cross over and go back.  As we re-entered Slovenia, the guards were waving everyone through who had a Slovene license plate.  Whew!

We took the next exit and I re-navigated over roads that are in Slovenia.  We climbed a lot of hills, and the roads were mostly very narrow.  In the US, we would consider them one-way roads, but people here just figure out how to get around each other.  There are a lot of little places where you can pull over a bit more and they make it work.

The way to the heart road.

Slovenia is the most delightful place to drive you can imagine.  As you go over the little hills, you come to little cleared farms with farm cottages and barns.    We finally came to a steep part of the road and finally came to a sign with a heart on it and an arrow that pointed to a lane between two houses.  We felt like we were driving through somebody's front yard, but at the end is a little bar/refreshment stand.  Just beyond it is the observation point, which is protected by St. George.

St. George stabbing his spear into the dragon's mouth as his horse tramples it.

And what was this all for?  Quite simply the very ordinary road we had driven up the hill has a particular look from the top.

The Heart Road

People come here from all over to see this view.  We first heard about it while we lived in Croatia.  It is interesting that the road forms a near perfect heart from this vantage, but it's not the most impressive thing we've seen.  The views from this hilltop, however, rate among the very best.

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And, finally, there is a mountain on the other side of the river from us that extends back into the foothills of the Alps.  We had a day where we could take off for an afternoon and decided to visit the treetop walkway and tower.  It's not that far away from Maribor as the crow flies, but we aren't crows.  We drove half way to Celje, turned west and drove that far again, then turned north and climbed almost 5,000 feet through wondrously gorgeous forests and farms (just normal stuff for Slovenia) to the peak near Rogla.  We paid €18 to walk on a platform walk that stayed mostly at treetop level to a tower.

We were still below the treetops at this point, and the tower rises a lot higher than we were here!

As we approached the tower we could see the circular slide that you can use to go back down.  My knees don't bother me much to climb, but coming down does, so I decided that was the way for me.  We had to carry our slide pads up, and then another €2 each to take the slide.  It's a long, long way down and the slide is entirely enclosed.  I didn't have time to get claustrophobic, though.  I mostly just worried about staying upright as the centrifigal force built up, and then it spit me out on my side.  Boy!  What a ride.

And this handsome devil is enjoying the views over the mountains and valleys.

If you are observant, you might notice that I was wearing a new Panama hat (which like all Panama hats are made of a particular grass in Honduras.)  The thing with a Panama hat is that you can roll it up and put it in your suitcase - a thing I will test on my way home to America, in six months.

So, that's what we do when we get a day off in Slovenia.