Lake Bohinj, Lake Bled, Radovljica

Our first full day here. I ordered a breakfast box last night from a local company that arrived at 8am this morning. It was tremendous with so much goodies all local stuff that will last us a few days. The bread was very good and the hard boiled eggs were still warm. Slovenia is famous for its honey and there was a small glass jar of it too.

The weather was wet! So we drove to Lake Bohinj to get some atmospheric shot as low cloud and the scenery would look good we thought. As it happened the rain stopped and we had a walk and found this statue to Four Brave Men, the first to climb the highest peak in Slovenia the Triglav, height of 2864 metres back in 1778!

We walked further round the Lake and came to a bathing area and area for landing into the lake for watersports and a huge car park to cater for visitors and also toilets - this is what we have noticed already, the infrastructure to deal with people visiting to enjoy the outdoors.

We headed back to Lake Bled and looked for a car parking space. We turned into a hotel one and the young lad in parking duty stopped us and we asked how much the parking was . 40 euros for a half day (it was now 2pm) eh no I said that’s ridiculous and laughed. And we are only staying for a couple of hours anyway. 10 euros then he said . Again I said no, and we will leave. Then he said if you park there (a bit of a banking with two other cars you can have it for 8. I said 5 and then he agreed lol! A bit of bartering. We then Found out that parking at Bled is very expensive.

We went to a place overlooking the Lake to have their famous Bled Cake which was very light, the shape of our very heavy custard slice but not as sugary or sweet. Coffee and cake overlooking Bled. The colour of the water is unreal and very pretty with the church in the middle.

We had a good walk round part of the Lake, there are lots of benches dotted around for sitting and observing the beauty.

Next we headed to Radovljica, a lovely town not far away from where we stay. It was elevated and looked down a beautiful valley. We wandered through the old part and popped into their tourist office. Given that this town has a population of 5k it has a 50m swimming pool, a large municipal hall which is also a museum for the tourists to wander through and has a music school and does various classes their was a ballet class for youngsters and the young musicians were coming in with various instruments and lots of festivals in the summer. It seemed a real community. The lady in the tourist office was so friendly. She told us to go in to the Municipal Hall and then she asked us to try the honey liqueur and sample some local biscuits. A lot of tourist offices in Spain try to sell you stuff but this one was just doing the proper job and there was some local craft stuff on sale too.

We went to one of the local restaurants and had some traditional food which is very Austrian influenced. Their apple strudel for pudding was fab.

Well the first day over and am very impressed with this area. Beautiful scenery, friendly people and easy to drive.

We were bushed by 9 all this mountain air!