Over the Alps, Down to the Sea

 We have had a very busy time, and it keeps getting worse.  As I write this, we are half-packed to leave on a trip to Serbia and Bosnia & Hezogovina, tomorrow morning.  The audits are a lot of pre-work, an hour or two of examining the records, and then a lot more post-work.   Boring stuff.

We had a visit from our grand-daughter, Winter, last week.

This photo is from our first day together, after arriving at our little gasthaus near the airport.  She was exhausted.

The next day, we took her to Lake Bled - the place all the Slovene Tour books start with.

The castle on top of the hill - the old church a level down - the color of the water - the fish swimming by.  Pure magic.

The City of Bled installed this heart so people could take photos with the third Bled icon in the background - the little church on an island at the other end of the lake

We just had to have our picture taken, too.

Then we took a boat out to the island.  I've published stuff about those boats before.

Liz and Winter sitting in our boat as we started our journey to the island.  Another boat is in the background.

The island is much more scenic at this distance.

The girls went up to the church, but my knee was hurting from the stairs at the Gasthous, so I didn't go.  I just took photos.

It was nice.  The lake is entirely surrounded by mountains.  You can see people paddle out to the island.  Some also swim over from the camping area nearby.  It's fun to watch them go up the gravel path barefoot.

From there, we drove north and west towards where Slovenia meets Austria and Italy.  It is SUCH beautiful country.  

I really like the little church steeples in the villages in the mountains.  It looks serene.

We drove by TRIGLV, the tallest peak in the mission.  Its top was covered by clouds, and its bottom was blocked by trees.  I tried many places and never got a decent shot of it.  Nonetheless, it is awesome!

Google maps gave us the fastest route to our destination town, but we suddenly came to a border crossing into Italy!  So we pulled over and consulted the map.  The road that doesn't go through Italy took about an hour longer, and it was scary, but the views were stunning.

The road had dozens of switchbacks where as we approached a curve we could see the road immediately above us going further up.  Back and forth

Interestingly, the road was tar, but on the switchbacks, they had cobblestones where the road doubled back.  I guess it makes it easier to repair the winter damage.

We finally came to the peak at 1638 meters of elevation.  I think that's about the same elevation as Fillmore, but it is that high above the surrounding country.

   Liz took a break by hiking a short way up a little trail.  My knee was very sore that day from going up and down stairs in a rented house the night before, so she was driving and I wasn't about to go hiking.  But while I waited, I took a photo of a flower of Queen Anne's lace.

One flower: two yellow jackets, a small wasp, two flies, and assorted little bugs.

Turns out it is actually poison hemlock, not Queen Anne's lace.  The lace flower has guard tendrils under the flower, one red or purple flowerlet in the center, and a fuzzy stem.  This has none of those.  Maybe that's why the bugs were moving so slow.

Going down the other side - more switchbacks - we passed several old, old tunnels, and concrete blockhouses from WWI.  This is the very area where Earnest Hemingway drove his ambulance up and down the mountain.  He was sided with Italy.  His novel "A Farewell to Arms" is based on his experience there.

The reason we came was to scope out the place where we are going to hold a conference for senior missionaries.  We have twelve couples here and we all need a break from time to time.  The old tradition was that the newest couple was to organize the conference.  So when we arrived we were IT.  Then COVID hit and we thought we were off the hook.  But it fell on us anyway.  We wouldn't have picked this location - so far away from everything - but we had to do it here because it turned out that senior missionaries just before us put down a 1200 Euro deposit on rooms at the hotel in Bovec and it is non-refundable.  

It is a nice, modern hotel with a large conference room that is perfect.

From there we drove south along the Slovene-Italian border, and it is a lush area full of honeybees.

We saw several bee trucks.  This one holds 60 hives.  There were also many traditional Slovene bee houses, and some little places with just a few hives.  The fields were full of bees!

Final stop was a cave.  We bought tickets to this particular one because it has a train that goes inside and my sore knee appreciated that!  English speakers to the right, German to the left.  Slovene and Italian beyond that inside the mouth of the cave.

Waiting to go inside.

Flash photography was prohibited, so I was using only the cave lights.

This cave was huge and I only took a few shots of it from the train.  When we stopped, I realized people were glaring at me and I remembered that while the camera was not flashing, the auto-focus uses a little white light, which seemed very bright inside a dark cave.  Besides it was dripping inside there.  So I put my camera away.

A surprise was in store for me.  The train brought us 2 kilometers inside the cave.  Then they had us all got off the train and after it pulled away they announced that the next part of our tour was going to be 1.5 kilometers on foot!  Drat!  No photography.  Sore knee.  

  However, I can still walk and I had my cane (which I normally only use for stairs and steep slopes), so I pressed on.  I fell behind, but every time the guide stopped to talk, I moved up to the front.  That way I kept up with the group - more or less.  It truly was an amazing cave with huge chambers.  Stalagtites, Stalagmites, tubes, columns fans, curtains, and all the goodies.  I actually enjoyed it a lot, even though my knee was killing me by the end.  We also saw some cave dragons, eyeless newts about a foot long, that are pure white and move very, very slowly as they search for shrimps and worms.

Next morning we put Winter on her flight to go back to Holland.  

Today we had church, which I conducted.

Tomorrow we leave for Serbia and Bosnia and more adventure!