Slovenia

It’s almost midnight in Nafplio, and Alice and I are catching up on errands after watching a particularly beautiful sunset over the city port and spending a packed nine days with our parents in the Greek islands. We realized this morning that we’ve barely had a chance to sleep in on this sabbatical; early-morning flights and Alice’s ironclad insistence on taking advantage of hotel breakfasts made sure of that. We’ll finally get the chance to catch up on whatever relaxing we were supposed to have done in the past eight months in these last two weeks of May, as we find our way from the Peloponnese coast to the rolling hills of Tuscany. It’s exciting to have a new sort of vacation to look forward to.

Nina was the one who suggested we stop in Slovenia on our way to Greece from London. Neither of us really had any idea of what to expect, and by the time we left, the country still defied easy classification in my mind: an unexpected mix of Alpine and Balkan, incredibly green and dramatically misty, with landscapes that would jump between the Pacific Northwest or the Rocky Mountains to pastoral Swiss countryside in an instant.

Lake Bled

Our first day in Slovenia started in London, at some ungodly hour of the late night or early morning as we suffered from some of the worst jet lag of our entire trip. We eventually made it to Lake Bled by around noon, and after a two-hour nap in our car, we hiked up a muddy trail to this view. There was this moody, gray-blue overtone to everything that day which I haven’t really seen anywhere else.

The Julian Alps

Slovenia seems like one of the only places where I could imagine being happy about the weather being completely overcast. It was just that throughout our stay, but in an unusually beautiful way where one could make out layers upon layers of clouds, with the lowest tendrils of mist often seemingly hanging just above eye level. Cloudy days also tend to wash out the colors of a forest, but from the window of our hotel in on the outskirts of a ski village near the Austrian-Italian border, the multitude of greens on display, from forest to lime, were more vivid than seemed possible as the mist rolled through.