Meredith and I like using local guides where we can find them and afford them. I also knew I did not want to drive in the Alps, even if “only” the smaller Julian Alps, so we arranged to have a tour guide drive us around them. That was a very good decision, since the drives I have done this week were easy compared to some of today’s roads.

Our guide was one recommended by Rick Steves’ tour book – his name was Gorazd, and he was in his late fifties. He was a native of Slovenia, but had traveled extensively while with the Yugoslavian national hockey team, including participating in three Olympics in the 1970s and 1980s. He lived for many years in Italy, playing and then coaching hockey, and he moved back about seven years ago to help with his daughter and son-in-law’s tour company (and to be with his grandchildren). He never remembered his father until he met him when Gorazd was thirty-two years old – his father had escaped Yugoslavia during the Communist years and was afraid to return. In short, Gorazd is an interesting man, and he took us all around today for about eight hours.

Gorazd picked us up at our B and B at the tourist farm, and we set off in his car, with Meredith in the front. I wanted her up front because a) she saved for the trip, b) she is more social than I am, especially with non-native English speakers, and c) I knew I might have trouble with my fear of heights in the Alps, so I thought it better to let her enjoy the best views.

Our first stop was Slovenia’s ski-jumping center, where they have eight different jumping hills of different heights, including a bigger-than-Olympics monster hill where jumpers fly close to 250 meters (820 feet) in the air. We actually got to see some jumps on the intermediate training hills – they water down plastic grass on the landing area to make it slick, and the launch hill tracks are made of porcelain, so the track is always slick. We saw a boy and a girl about ten or twelve years old making some pretty impressive jumps.

We then got diverted from the original plan to go over the highest pass in Slovenia, because there was a bicycle race over the pass during the morning. Gorazd decided to do his tour in reverse, and that worked out perfectly. The morning weather was on-and-off rain, and we had steady rain while we were at lunch and while we were in a museum. The last few hours were gloriously clear, and so the reversal of the route worked out perfectly.

We went over a smaller pass that led us briefly through Italy (score another country for this trip!) and then back into Slovenia. Slovenia is a full member of the European Union, so they have open borders with other full-EU states like Italy, so the border crossing was almost non-existent, except for the old guard stations and one police car (that I think was there to check cargo in trucks – they never gave us a second look).

The drive was very pretty, and Gorazd told us how a landslide took out half a village and the road a few years back, but because Slovenians do not like to move, they rebuilt the homes. We stopped at a World War I fortress. Not much happened in this part of the world in World War II, but the Soca river area was a much-contested front in WW I. Slovenia fought with the Austro-Hungarian Empire against Italy (and Italy’s allies, the French, British, and Americans). This area of Slovenia was heavily fortified, and many of the mountain roads and passes were built because of and for the war effort. The fort at which we stopped had a lookout post on top of a cliff that was reached by a staircase-ladder that was mounted in the cliff face. Men had to climb that ladder every two hours for guard duty. It looked as if it would’ve been hazardous in the best conditions, let alone in the winter.

We continued on to a cute town called Bovec, where we ate on a covered patio, under a beautiful grape arbor. On the recommendation of Gorazd, we both ordered local specialty dishes, which were excellent.

We moved on to the next town, Kobarid, where we got out of the rain by spending about ninety minutes in a World War I museum. We saw a short film on the Soca front, which I had not even known about before this trip. Italy started WW I as a neutral country, but then after ten months of war, Italy launched a surprise attack on Slovenia and their allies, pushing into Slovenia. Much of the fighting in this region was in very difficult mountainous terrain. After a few months, Slovenia and Germany launched a massive surprise counterattack, winning back the territory and pushing a little ways into Italy, where they reached a stalemate.

The exhibits of the museum included passages from diaries of the soldiers, which were gruesome and moving. They had many photos of the war, including showing tunnels and trenches in the ice and snow in the mountains. There were weapons and other artifacts from the war. Gorazd later told us that when he was a teenager (which would have been in the late sixties), when he went hiking in the mountains, he could still see lots of old equipment from WW I lying around. He was told never to touch it in case it was still able to explode. The museum was very moving and was a sobering reminder of how many people suffered and died in WW I.

After we came out of the museum, we found that the rain had stopped and the sun had even come out. That was a happy thing, as we were headed to the Vrsic pass, which included twenty-five switchbacks on the ascent as we climbed to 1,611 meters (one mile). Here I was very glad that Meredith was in the front seat and Gorazd was driving. I got a bit sick looking out at the sheer mountains all around us. I was very happy to see them on foot when we pulled off at one point to see two different valleys, and again at the top, but the ascent was quite dizzying for me. Meredith loved it.

On the descent, we stopped at a small Russian chapel near the road. In WWI, the road on which we were driving was built partly by Russian prisoners. An avalanche occurred, killing some Russian prisoners and some of the guards. The friends of the victims built a small wooden chapel to commemorate their friends.

We then made our way back to Lake Bled, where we said goodbye to Gorazd. He was an excellent guide, and we were pleased with the day. We grabbed some pizza for supper, and then walked around part of the lake, enjoying the evening sunshine. We passed near the entrance to an adventure park that had an alpine slide, so I decided we should try it. We got to ride a slow and peaceful chairlift to the top, where we could look down on the lake, the town, and even the castle. Mer then got into a car, which was mounted to a single track all the way down the hill. I was much amused by her enthusiastic verbal manifestations of, well, fear, as she rocketed away. It was then my turn, and after getting situated, I was off. It was fun – it was fast, but the braking system worked very well, and the track was laid out with lots of curves to keep it interesting. Meredith and I both agreed it was a kicky little ride.

We walked back to the B and B, where we were greeted by a busload of Italian tourists eating supper. We also got to pet two of the ten farm cats, and then we headed up to our balcony to eat some chocolate we had purchased, while watching the mountains – a fine ending to an alpine day.

To go from Logarska Dolina to Lake Bled takes about an hour and forty-five minutes. If you use Google maps, it sends you southwest on major highways through the capital Ljubljana. Rick Steves’ guidebook sends you southwest on major highways through the capital Ljubljana because “mountains get in the way.” If you are clueless, mapless American tourists totally dependent on a GPS, you go OVER the mountains on one-and-a-half lane roads with numerous switchbacks! Fun!

Before we left Logarska Dolina, we did swing into the tourist center to say goodbye to Nina, our museum friend. We stayed and chatted with her for about an hour and exchanged e-mail addresses. We hope to stay in touch in case we come back or she comes to the United States. She is a bright, fun, and cheerful girl.

The over-the-mountain with-some-woods drive was made more exciting at the start by the fact that our GPS kept losing signal with the satellites. Once we got out of the looming Logarska mountains, it settled down. My theory was that we were getting nearer and nearer the satellites as we drove up and up.

We arrived at our tourist farm Bed and Breakfast around 2:00. A tourist farm is a working farm that also happens to have a few rooms for rent. Our farm is about a half-mile walk to Lake Bled, a small but beautiful lake that is admittedly a bit of a tourist trap, but it is a pretty one. It has a small island with a hill on it, and on the hill is a cute church. The town is presided over by a very impressive cliff with a castle on it, and the town itself is fairly cute. What we did not know but know now is that Lake Bled is also home to the Slovenian rowing teams who have done quite well in the Olympics.

We dumped our stuff in our room and started walking to the lake, in a gentle but steady rain. In a rare moment of sense, I had listened to Meredith a couple of days ago and bought an umbrella. It came in very handy today. The lake is about 3.5 miles around, and the whole way has a path, which is public. We turned right when we reached the lake, and started toward the town of Bled, about a mile away. Happily, about this time, the rain stopped. We got to Bled and went to a restaurant right on the lake, but we chose to eat inside (facing windows) because of the bugs that had come out after the rain.

We had a very good late lunch and dessert, and we took our time, since it had started raining again, and this time a bit more steadily. Finally, we decided we should just brave the weather, so out we went with our umbrellas. Meredith put me “in charge” for the next few days, so rather than trudge around the lake in a steady rain, I decided to change plans and climb up to the castle, which offered some indoor diversions. We climbed a steep path that became a series of stairs, and made it to the castle, just in time for the rain to start easing up. Ah, well.

The castle is interesting as a castle, with a proper wall and towers and arrow slits and such. It offers a working model of an early printing press and a history of the importance of the press in Slovenia (it was used to print church books in the then-outlawed Slovenian language). We got to see a small photography exhibit on the Bled area that was very good. There is an iron-working shop that sells hand-made iron items. They have an extensive museum about the history of the Bled area, the castle, and the geography and geology of the region. All well and good and interesting.

But the winning reason to go to the castle is to climb as high as possible and admire the view. You can see the lake and the island. You can see the cliff face of the castle. There are small and big mountains (up to about 6,500 feet tall) in every direction. It was spectacular.

After we toured the castle, we headed back down to the town in a misting rain. We ducked into a market and grabbed a couple of sandwiches and candy bars for a supper later back at the B and B, at which point the rain finally stopped for good. We found where we left off on the lake trail, and we continued on our way.

Some of the highlights of the trail included seeing the island from all angles, and seeing the lavish few homes allowed on the lake. We got to see the rowing center, and saw some crews out rowing. There are even some small grandstands set up near the finish areas for the scows. There was a boardwalk built over the lake at the shoreline for about two hundred yards. And all the while, the weather kept getting better and better, with some patches of blue sky peeking out. By the time we finished our lake walk and were headed back home, the sun had come out, and the sky was beautiful with the sun shining off the clouds and the wispy fog on the mountains.

We got back to our farm and were greeted with the happy vision of two kittens staring at us from a stack of railroad ties. Very cute. We headed back to the room for a late supper and called it a day, one that was mostly dry for us.

Sometimes, Rick Steves’ guidebooks are not clear. I quote, for example, his saying that one of the smaller valleys in this area is “more gentle and accessible with better and more level roads.” Ha! Either we missed a turn, or Rick was smoking something. But I get ahead of myself.

After we got ready and had breakfast at our hotel, we jumped in the car. Logarska Dolina is the major valley in this region, but there are two smaller valleys here as well. One, we explored yesterday on the end of our drive on the Panoramic Road. The other was the morning’s destination, and Rick boldly proclaimed it as easy to deal with, which was good after the logging road we seemed to be using yesterday.

The road up into the valley started off a bit intimidating. It was paved, but was certainly only one car wide, with no turnoffs. We got through that well, and the road widened out. Well and good. After a little distance with great views, the pavement ended. Odd, but still okay. Then the road took a major hairpin turn and narrowed. Then it had another hairpin turn. Soon, we were driving way up over fields and other drop-offs, with no guard rails, no sight lines, and very few places to pull off. The views were spectacular, but the driving was white-knuckle in many places. We kept driving up and up and up, hairpin curve after hairpin curve, until we came to a grouping of three farms and a dead end. Drat – we’d have to drive down that same road. Happily, Meredith asked me how the brakes were, which reminded me that in the standard-shift vehicle we had, I could leave it in first gear and not use the brakes much. We made it down safely, but I was very glad not to have to do that drive again.

After the Fun Drive (and the views were amazing, I have to say), we drove over to the major valley, Logarska Dolina, with its major roads, biking trails, walking trails, some hotels, and some restaurants. I was pleased to pay seven euros to get in if it meant I could drive normally in the park.

Meredith wanted to start with the major waterfall in the park, Rinka waterfall. You can drive almost to the waterfall, about five miles into the park. You need to walk the rest of the way along a decent, if somewhat rocky, trail that takes about fifteen minutes to get to the falls. They are worth it. The falls do not have a heavy volume of water, but that makes it more interesting. They are very high at three hundred feet, and the water breaks up some as it falls in waves and is blown around by the wind. The short of it is that the falls move left and right as the wind gusts, and it is fascinating to watch. You can hike right up to the edge of the falls, and there is an observation platform with a small store. Meredith and I took advantage of both by having the world’s most scenic ice cream stop – falls on one side and towering cliffs all around.

The cliffs in the park are amazing. They are almost all grey, with very steep sides. They are around 6500 feet tall, and they seem to loom over you if you get close enough to the bases of the mountains.

When we got back to the car, Meredith wanted to drive halfway down the valley to a tourist information station, and then walk the hiking trail back to the parking lot of the falls, which would be roughly a two-mile walk, which would take about an hour each way.

Three small issues. One – the tourist information station was closed. Two – the stopping spot was more than halfway to the entrance. Three – the walk took us two full hours, one way. But I get ahead of myself.

The start of the trail was very peaceful – it seemed deep in the woods, even though the road was never far away. In the full two hours and twenty minutes we spent on the trail in the park, both before and after supper, we never saw another soul on the trail. My theory, which Mer likes, is that bikers use the road and the serious hikers hike on the alpine trails. At any rate, we had the place to ourselves.

The trail was quite varied over the length of it. We had smooth, pine-needle soft footing, heavily rooted trail, gravel parts, and steep, rocky sections. It started out flat, but slowly rose for most of the trail, ending with some heavy-breathing sections of trail. It was not always perfectly marked – we had to guess at several points, and made one serious mistake that, if we had not corrected it, would have had us hiking up to a mountain hut. We caught that one after only a couple of minutes. Generally, the trail was engulfed in trees, but that made it very dramatic when they would open up and you would see the mountains looming over you. We crossed dry stream beds full of gravel, and we came up toward the falls in such a way that we could see them from a distance, which you can’t do if you take the road.

By the end of the trail, we were both pretty tired – it had taken two hours over some rough terrain. By mutual consent, we took the road back toward our car, which was still a forty-five-minute walk. Our car was parked across the street from a farm/hotel/restaurant, so we grabbed supper there even though it was only 5:00. We got to eat at the most scenic table on the planet, and the food was farm fresh and pretty healthy.

After supper, we checked out the waterfall behind the hotel, which was not a free-fall waterfall like the bigger one, but was still impressive and came down over the rock face in several channels. Mer wanted to walk a little more, so we walked another ten minutes down the walking trail, away from the falls. It was more of the same with lots of trees and some glimpses of mountains, but it was pretty and super quiet. We felt really isolated.

We drove out of the valley and toward the small village next to our hotel. We were going to grab some dessert, but before we did, we ran into Nina, our young museum guide from yesterday. We wanted to show her a picture of a rare flower we took. She was impressed, but informed us it wasn’t the flower we’d thought it was. Ah. Still, we talked with her for thirty or more minutes, about multiple topics, from where she goes to school to Slovenian politics to the breakup of Yugoslavia. She was warm and friendly, and we love talking with locals.

We missed all of the stores in the village closing, so we drove back to the smaller valley to see if we could find where we had missed the “easy” road. We could not, and rather than get stuck on that nail-biter road again, I turned around. We went back to our hotel, where we had dessert from their restaurant, on the deck, overlooking the mountains as the sun went down. It was a fine evening (and day).

One thing you can count on for sure on a Meredith-led sightseeing tour is you will sleep well. I did not wake up at all last night, and was again surprised when the alarm went off. We wrapped up our time in Ptuj with getting ready, eating breakfast, packing, and checking out. We pointed the car west an hour, and ended up in an industrial town of forty thousand people, Velenje. We were there to see its very scenic castle, which overlooked a very concrete-rich town.

The castle looked like a proper castle, if more luxurious looking. It had a wall and towers, and you even had to enter it via a narrow footbridge. We found the reception area and bought two tickets to the castle and its eclectic collection for only five euros total (about seven dollars). This is already pretty shockingly low, but the woman who took our money then took us around the castle herself, narrating everything in solid but wonderfully, charmingly broken English. She spent almost two hours with us, all for seven bucks.

We saw all of the collections, and we learned about the town along the way. The town was created to work the coal mines of the region, with the city begun around 1950 and officially “opened” just a few years later, having gone from a village to a small city almost overnight. The architecture was classic communist concrete apartment block, but it still was a mighty achievement.

The collections: we started with medieval Valenje, with a look at the church of the time, and how a peasant would have lived. We got distracted with asking questions, so we missed the aristocracy portion of the exhibit. We then moved on to life during Communist times, which in Yugoslavia was not so harsh as in Soviet-style Communism. We got to see several rooms of works by local painters, some of which were very moving. After that was a look at the works of an excellent local sculptor, who is now ninety and still creating art. Next was a collection of African artifacts (including a mask room where the guide started with the lights out and turned on a switch that made some of the eyes glow) that had been the collection of an artist who lived and worked in Africa for over twenty years. He died in Valenje, so his collection and some of his art went to the museum. We were then walked through a mock-up of an early twentieth-century pub and general store. Outside the main keep of the castle, we saw a chapel with artifacts from a church that was flooded by the building of a dam. There was an exhibit of mastodon bones found in the area, and a collection of high school art which was good, including a couple of excellent works. We finished the tour with a small room of WW2 memorabilia and artifacts. It was quite a tour!

We then drove on to our destination for the next two days – Logarska Dolina. Dolina means “valley.” The Logarska region is remote and is protected as a park, so it is very rural. The mountains are the foothills of the region’s Alps, and so are very dramatic. The roads are narrow and winding, and the road was not even built until about 1900, so the region has not been touristed for very long.

We set up camp at our small hotel (with a kitty!), which looks out over the mountains and has a stream running right next to it – beautiful. We drove into the small town about a mile away to visit the information center and to get lunch (lunch was a sandwich from the local supermarket). While I was waiting outside the bathroom for Meredith, I struck up a conversation with the young woman who was at the information desk. She was very friendly, and so when Meredith came out of the bathroom, we did all the things she recommended. We watched a fifteen-minute film on the region, and then she took us through a small mock-up of the area’s highlights, geography, and culture. She escorted us up the hill to another building to show us a butterfly collection and fossils found in Logarska Dolina or nearby. She was a great guide, and all of this was free. On her recommendation, we climbed a little higher to get a close look at the village church.

We stopped in at the information center again for some dessert to fuel us for the next sightseeing jaunt – a drive along the Panoramic Road, which is a sometimes two-lane road that is sometimes paved that winds up into the alpine fields and farms. Happily, except for the first half-mile on the paved section, I never met an oncoming car over the whole eight-mile trip, which took us about two hours.

The scenery was amazing. I kept stopping the car to get out and look and to try to take photographs that I knew would never capture the depth of the mountains. Then, we would go another half-mile, and I’d have to stop and get out again. It was cloudy and still beautiful – it must be spectacular on a sunny day. We extended our driving trip by taking an unpaved road around part of the valley. There were parts of the road that reminded me of logging roads – rough and not very wide. It was not so scenic as the Panoramic Road, but it was still worthwhile. As an aside, we took one wrong turn, which we quickly sorted out. If we had not, in just a few minutes we would have been at the Austrian border.

We got back to the hotel around 8:00, and so we settled in for the night. We got supper in the hotel restaurant and then decided to get ready for bed. The temperature is supposed to get into the forties tonight, so we’re anticipating another sound sleep after a busy Day Four.

Europeans have several clear advantages over Americans. One, they serve hot chocolate at every breakfast, winter or summer. Two, bathrooms are private privies, being mini-rooms inside larger public restrooms. Three, most modern European places have built-in shades that slide over the window completely, blocking all light.

It was this last feature that made me surprised when the alarm went off – it was still dark, so I could not understand why the beeping started. It turns out it was 8:30 am, since breakfast only went until 9:30, but it seemed early to my eyes.

Breakfast was included in our B and B, and it was a continental affair, with granola, yogurt, breads, meats, cheeses, and so on. In an exciting international moment, what I thought was strawberry jam turned out to be some rather pungent meat puree. Happily, Meredith warned me to that possibility before I ate it.

After breakfast, we crossed over the river on the pedestrian/bike bridge, and we walked ten minutes along the river. Along the way, we spotted two kitties, one of which was very happy to have his head petted. We ended up at the local spa/water park. The spa has saunas and whirlpool tubs and swimming pools and… water slides. As one does. The park did not look open quite yet (it was 10:30), so we decided to go to Plan B – to go back and get the car and go to Maribor.

Maribor is one of my leading town candidates for 1950s film monster names (as in, “Release the… MARIBOR!”). Above and beyond providing me with some quirky humor, Maribor is Slovenia’s second biggest city (after the capital Ljubljana), with about 130,000 people. The downtown area is busy, but has some good walking sights, so we visited those.

After parking the car in a hotel garage (for about five dollars), we walked to a large square near the river, which is the same one that runs through Ptuj, the Drava. We took a look at a monument to plague victims that was in the square, and then we headed down to the river to walk along it for a bit. We saw a couple of swans, some ducks, some very lovely willow trees, a nice bridge with water fountains shooting into the river, and an old fortress that had been converted to a wine shop. It was a very pleasant walk.

We headed back up to the square and into the main pedestrian zone. It started to rain lightly, so we stopped at a café to grab a hot chocolate for me. Sadly, the mist kept falling, so we continued on to look at a Franciscan church. Meredith knows I am a St. Francis fan, so I like to see Franciscan churches. This one was made of brick, and was fairly new, having been finished around 1900.

Meredith’s trusty guidebook by Rick Steves recommended a small museum for those interested in history, so we checked it out. It turned out to be a very interesting museum. It covered Slovenia’s involvement in WW1 and WW2, with some focus on Maribor in the war. The WW1 and WW2 portions were presented side by side, so you could compare causes of each war, weapons in each war, medical treatment, women’s participation, propaganda, and so on. It was fascinating to do it that way, and we learned a lot. You could even send a Morse code message from one bunker in one room to another bunker in another room, assuming your partner did not confuse dots and dashes.

We finished up our tour of Maribor with a visit to its small cathedral. The cathedral’s main interest for me was its stained glass windows. Four of the windows were representations of the four Gospels, and they were created in 2004. Another window showed Pope John Paul II and was dated 1999. We thought it must have been to commemorate a visit, but were not sure. Meredith pointed out it was the first time she recognized someone from our lifetime in a stained glass window.

Back in Ptuj, we grabbed a quick bite to eat at a bakery (it was around 4:30), before heading back to the spa. The water park was still closed because it was too cold out, but the spa was open. We changed in the free-for-all coed changing areas that happily had individual booths, and made our way into the spa. We spent much of our time there in one or another of the three hot tubs, but in between sessions there, we found one fun water slide that was attached to the spa itself, and it was running. The slide was interesting in itself – the slide was an enclosed tube. The top was illuminated with pictures of the Coliseum in Rome and the Parthenon and some random pictures of flames. The middle section was lit in an orange-pink light, and the bottom section was in total darkness, which was a bit freaky. We must have ridden the slide at least ten times, and as far as we could tell, we were the only people over the age of thirty going on it.

We did also swim in the pool, but I found it to be a fair amount of work to swim a lap, so the hot tubs won out over the pool. Mer wanted to try the sauna, and I cautiously agreed. We went to the least-hot sauna (around 120 degrees), and I opened the door. Dante yelled to stop letting all the cold air in, so I slammed it shut. Actually, there were already people in there, and the brief exposure to that much heat and steam caused me to take a step back. No, thank you! The hottest sauna was a whopping 210 degrees; why people would do that is beyond me.

The spa was a great treat coming so soon after a long airplane trip. I told Mer more than once that it was the best day touring ever.

After the spa, we walked back to the town to grab supper at a pizza place, where we ate outside, as we have most of our meals here. We were determined to find ice cream, but the ice cream places were all closed at 9:30 – who knew? We found a restaurant that served pastries, and we ate those out on the main (new) square of the town, which was almost empty. It was a quiet ending to a fairly mellow day. Here is hoping for a good night’s sleep in my very dark room.

We woke up in Zagreb, Croatia, which is important to establish on a trip that covers three countries in fourteen days. We showered and got ready, and moseyed out to a bakery on the main square to pick up some breakfast pastries, which we took back to our hostel and ate in their lovely enclosed courtyard.

Then we packed up, checked out, and set out to pick up our rental car. With the help of Google Maps (thank you!), we figured out which tram and then which bus to take to get to the car rental place. We got there with only a little difficulty in finding the bus stop. It turned out that their computer system was down, so they drove us back out to the airport and dropped us there. The computer was down there as well, but the young man at the desk filled out the forms by hand and away we drove, listening to Cat Stevens and the Beatles on Croatian radio. We were headed to Ptuj (pit-too-ey) in Slovenia, a trip of only a little over an hour, made much easier by my strangely-ahead-of-the-game thought to buy a GPS with the Europe maps loaded on it, a week before we left home. It worked like a charm.

The roads in Croatia are excellent, with the highway having a speed limit of 80 mph. When we got close to the border, we had to go through several tunnels in smaller mountains. The border crossing was almost effortless – the guards on both sides of the border looked at our passports and the Slovenian guard stamped them.

We arrived at Ptuj around noon. I found the town to be charming – it is built on a small hill, with a scenic river out in front, and red-tiled homes huddled together. We found our B and B, an amazing little place called Silak (shee-lahk). It is run by a very friendly couple who informed us the house is between five hundred and eight hundred years old (the oldest records were lost in a fire, so they do not know for sure). It is always humbling to sleep somewhere older than my country. The B and B has beautiful exposed beams, marble tile in the bathroom, slanting roofs (which Mer has always loved), air conditioning, and internet access. I highly recommend it.

Once we dumped our stuff, we set out to wander the small town and to acquire some light lunch. On the recommendation of our host at the B and B, we stopped off at the library in town and made our way to the top floor. The top floor showed off an amazing array of exposed beams, and had good views of the river. We then wandered up the hill a bit, skipping the tempting stairs to the castle, and made our way through the old small square to the newer square, where we found a bakery. We munched on cheese bread while sitting on a bench outside the town hall, where we got to observe the very quiet town in all of its inaction. My kind of place.

After lunch, we did head up to the castle. The castle is now a very eclectic museum, housing several collections. We started with the mask collection, which is really a costume collection of the costumes villagers wear for a parade late in winter. The parade is designed to drive off winter and bring in spring, so it has a fertility feel for much of it – plows and livestock and a display of eligible young men and women. The main focus of the parade is the flock of Kurent demons – people dressed up in wool, masks, horns, stick, and cowbells, who are supposed to frighten the winter away.

Once we had seen the mask museum, we entered the main section of the castle itself (which is more of a fortified mansion than a typical defensive castle). The main floor is now a museum of the furniture that had been used in the castle, from the 1700s until the 1900s. You can also see the three-hundred-year-old plastered ceilings with their still-intact ornamentations.

Next on the tour list was the castle’s festival hall, which is still used for concerts. The hall is surrounded by huge portraits of various people groups, mostly Turks, and all certainly done by people who had never seen a Turkish or a Chinese or a Native American person before.

We headed upstairs to the third floor to look at the art collection of the castle, which is mostly paintings of the lords and ladies of Ptuj, along with copies of masterpieces done by local artists. That was fascinating – it was interesting to see why talented locals were not so good as world masters – it generally came down to details – background figures were not painted in detail, or foreground subjects had no life to them (no individual hairs on the head, clothes not fluid, etc.).

We wound our way down to the ground floor again to look at the musical instrument collection, which includes the remains of several rare Roman instruments. There are also sixteenth-century lutes, and a good collection of harpsichords and pianos, along with some old marching band instruments.

The last of the collection is the armory, where there were a couple of suits of armor, several small cannon, some firearms of various types and ages, and lots of swords. The most impressive part was they had a two-handed great sword lying out for people to heft for photographs. It was very heavy.

We had dodged a short but heavy rain while in the castle, and so with good weather we headed back to the B and B to regroup before supper. After a fifteen-minute rest, Mer took me to a local monastery that had been destroyed by bombs in World War 2, but had been rebuilt in stages from the 1980s to 2010. The church of the monastery is simple, modern, and one of the most beautiful churches I have ever seen. The stained glass is modern, with vibrant colors and shapes suggesting Biblical events instead of showing them outright. In one window was a shape suggesting Jesus wearing the crown of thorns. In another was probably a boat that could have been Jesus calming the storm or walking on the water, or could have been Noah’s ark. They were very impressive. The church also had modern art versions of the stations of the cross that were more suggestive than literal, and several of them were very moving. Inside the church was one older lady who was very friendly, but did not speak English. We both felt bad that we could not understand her, as she was talkative and seemed very proud of the church.

For supper, we swung by the room and then we walked the short distance over to the Amadeus restaurant, where we promptly ate too much. I made the mistake of thinking a “starter course” was an appetizer, when it really is a full meal in itself. I have no idea how the Italians, who eat multi-course meals often, do it. By the time my real meal came, I was comfortably full. I foraged on – it was a very good meal.

We saw some rain coming after supper, so we went back to the room to wait it out, which took about twenty minutes. Then, we strolled the town to a cute restaurant for dessert. The restaurant had a patio built around three trees that had the thickest foliage I have ever seen. As such, you sat under a canopy of leaves. It was pretty marvelous. We had some cake, and I got my first European hot chocolate of this trip – that I pretty much had to eat with a spoon (European hot chocolate is pretty thick). After a quick walk down to the river and across the pedestrian bridge for an evening view of Ptuj, we went back to the B and B to escape the rain that had just started up again. Thus ended Day Two of our little adventure.

Day One of our European vacations is mellow out of necessity. After traveling for twenty or thirty hours with little or no sleep, it is wise to take the first day fairly easy. Having said that, we don’t like to waste time either.

The airport at Zagreb is tiny – I think the Akron/Canton airport is bigger. Passport control asked no question, but did stamp our passports, and customs had a “nothing to claim” line that led right outside. Once outside, we jumped on a bus that would take us to the city bus station. In an example of the dominance of American entertainment culture, the radio played nothing but pop songs in English the whole twenty-minute trip to the bus station.

My impression of Zagreb was mixed. The outskirts of the city seemed to be all communist-era huge apartment blocks that thought concrete was the end-all and be-all in architecture. On the other hand, there seemed to be parks everywhere, with good bike trails and sidewalks.

From the bus station, we picked up a tram ticket that would take us to the main square of the old (non-communist) section of town. While we waited, we struck up a conversation with a young American couple who were in Croatia on their delayed-from-October honeymoon, with a planned visit to Moscow at the end of the trip. That is an adventurous couple!

The tram arrived, and we were whisked to the very cute old part of town. We still had a ten-minute walk with some backtracking to find our hostel. We dumped our luggage and put into practice our sure-fire way to break jet lag – we took a two-hour nap. There are two common trains of thought about European jet lag – get to the hotel and sleep, or stay up all day until normal local bedtime. In the first case, we have always felt that going to sleep right away just keeps you on your old sleep schedule, and you would be wide awake in the middle of the local night. In the second case, staying up for what would be thirty or more hours sounds like a great way to be miserable on your first day. We compromise by taking a two-hour nap and then forcing ourselves to get up and go to dinner. It lets us still get some touring in (about three hours today), but keeps us feeling more or less normal.

We basically wandered around the old part of the city, based around a giant public square. We took a quick look inside a free exhibit on the European Space Agency, and we saw a fun little sculpture of the sun, and two to-scale tiny sculptures of Mars and Venus (they were planted around the city by a second artist, which caused the locals to have to figure out where they were). We bumped into a Croatian male a cappella singing group (a national genre), which we listened to for a couple of songs. We heard a beautiful song in Croatian coming out of a church on the main square, one that we know in English. We rode the shortest funicular (steep train) in Europe to get to the hill overlooking the city, wound around the streets to a beautiful church, down past the old red-light district, which is where the restaurants now are, where we ate on the sidewalk of a good restaurant and we people-watched. We had dessert at a cookie place (we had the excellent mint brownies), and we finished off by wandering over to the cathedral, which had a beautiful illuminated front entrance. By then, it was starting to rain, so we walked back to the hostel to call it a night. It was not an ambitious day, but it was not supposed to be – it was just Day One.

This year, Mer’s European vacation fund got used for a tour of Croatia, Slovenia, and a quick side-trip into Bosnia. But first, we had to get there.

As usual, we took advantage of the cheap flights offered out of Toronto. Since Toronto is 4.5 hours away on a good (no traffic) day, I decided we should head up there Friday night and spend the night before our Saturday evening flight to London and on to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia.

The only slight hitch in the plan was that we had promised to go to the graduation party of one of Meredith’s students at 5:00. We figured that would work well, as it was close to home and on the way north, and we could treat it as supper; that would allow us to get to Toronto efficiently.

We got off to a late start, as seems usual with our trips, leaving the house around 5:30. Then, we were at the graduation party later than I expected, not leaving until around 6:45. Happily, the GPS estimated we would get to our hotel before midnight.

The trip up to Canada was uneventful – no bad weather, no traffic to speak of, and an easy border crossing. We did indeed get to the hotel around midnight. The hotel was very nice, and only a mile from the airport, and had a generous checkout time of noon. We took advantage of that by sleeping in late and not checking out on Saturday until right at noon.

Our flight was not until 6:40 pm, so we had some time. We grabbed lunch (breakfast for us) at the Subway next door, then we programmed the GPS to find James Gardens Park, which was only five miles away. The GPS found it, and took us to the nearest point of the park, which was a residential neighborhood with no access to the park (it was fenced off). It was not hard to backtrack and find a parking lot, and so we set out on a very pleasant stroll in the park.

James Gardens is a narrow strip of land that runs for some ways along a wide and shallow (and muddy, thanks to the recent rains) river. The paths were mostly in the shade, which was great, since the sun was out and it was warm.

We walked for about forty-five minutes, and then turned around. The river was quite lovely, and we actually found the garden part of James Garden – it was a large and wide area of the park, and there were lots of flowers about. The path wound through the woods, and finally crossed the river over a fun little pedestrian bridge that afforded great views of a road bridge above it. It was a great way to spend some extra time.

Not enough extra time, as it turns out. We got to the airport around 2:30, and were told that the check-in desk would not open until 3:30. We found a seat and I got us some food from Wendy’s, and we waited until the desk opened.

The check-in process was a bit lengthy and chaotic, but we still were at our gate an hour-and-a-half early. Better safe than sorry, I suppose. I started in on reading The Hunger Games, so I could finally understand references the students make. Mer kept reading Moby-Dick (her summer reading) and dipping around in her copy of Rick Steves’s guidebook on the Balkans.

The flight to London went well, except the flight was so full that Meredith and I could not sit together. We were separated by a row and a couple of seats, but in such a way that we could still see each other, which was good. In an unusual twist, I spent most of the flight reading The Hunger Games, which I finished and enjoyed, while Meredith watched a bunch of movies on the entertainment system (usually it is the other way around:  she reads, and I don’t). I finished the flight by watching The Importance of Being Earnest, so I had a very book-centered flight.

The transfer to the flight to Zagreb went fine, although we used most of our two-hour layover getting through security and such, so we only had about ten minutes to spare before we loaded a bus to go out to the plane on the tarmac. I dozed some on the two-hour-twenty-minute flight, since I had been up about twenty hours at that point.

We touched down and got on another bus that drove us a laughably short distance of maybe two hundred yards to the airport. We had arrived in Croatia!

a tribute to Jackson
(aka Jackso-beast or Back Beast, and, more recently, Scrawnycat or Old Bones)

“…So we think you and Matt would be able to give this cat a great home,” concluded the voice on the other end of the phone.

Our colleague’s wife Linda had heard that we’d lost our cat Bocca earlier that month, at about the same time that she and her husband had decided they needed to find a different home for their cat Jackson. Adopted as a young adult stray, Jackson had been especially close to Linda and Roger’s youngest son, but that son was now away at college, and Linda and Roger themselves were starting to have more allergy troubles as they got older.

Politely but firmly, I resisted Linda’s sales pitch, saying that even without Bocca, we still had two other cats, and that was enough – plus, after Bocca’s loss, we were leery of taking in a cat who was thought to be twelve or thirteen years old, the same age Bokey had been: what if Jackson were to die within months of coming to live with us? We didn’t want to take the risk.

My refusal prompted Roger and Linda to cast their nets more widely by posting a large picture of Jackson on a bulletin board at school, along with a note supposedly from Jackson, asking someone to adopt him. Because the picture and note had been hung right by our school mailboxes, we saw Jackson’s plea on a daily basis – and every day, his beseeching eyes wore down a little more of our resistance, until one day we cracked, and said all right, yes, we’d take him.

In addition to being haunted by those beseeching eyes, we couldn’t miss the fact that Jackson looked almost exactly like our dearly departed Bocca. Was it a sign? Had we found a substitute that could fill the sweet-faced-tiger-cat void in our hearts?

Though the bulletin board picture showed us that Jackson resembled Bokey physically, it also showed us that he couldn’t have an identical temperament, because there was no way we could’ve taken Bokey to a professional photographer and gotten him to pose charmingly in a basket, since he was terrified of people in general. When we met Jackson, however, he greeted us with pleasant equanimity, and during the years that he was ours, he reacted with similar equanimity any time guests were over.

Unfortunately, while Jackson warmed up to us easily enough, he was less quick to warm up to our other two cats. I’m not sure whether it was the sweetness of his nature, the fact that he’d been declawed, or a combination of the two, but it was clear that he’d never be the alpha cat in our household. If feeling threatened, he might hiss, growl, and sputter, but his fight-or-flight instinct leaned strongly toward the latter. We rarely witnessed actual altercations, and when we did, we’d break them up; even so, we’d occasionally feel scabs on his head from where one of the others had taken a swipe (or multiple swipes) at him. And I’m fairly sure it was about six months before I ever saw him asleep. I mean, he must’ve slept at some point, because I don’t think he could’ve survived otherwise … but only after half a year or so did I see him relax enough to close his eyes and curl up on the couch. Up until then, he spent almost all of his time crouching warily on the entryway rug.

To our relief, Jackson eventually became more comfortable in our home, and began sleeping on my pillow, lounging on the sun-warmed window seat, and trotting downstairs to greet us when we’d walk through the door. Of course, he’d often then make a halfhearted attempt to get out through that same door, which prompted us to start hailing him with the words “Back, beast!” Thankfully, these escape attempts were never earnest enough to succeed, because we had no intention of letting this former stray get back out on the mean streets of Cuyahoga Falls. According to Linda, he’d gotten out once when he lived with them, but that had been an accident: he’d pushed against a screen in a second-story window, and the screen hadn’t been firmly in place, causing Jackson to fall to the ground and break his leg. Found and treated in time, he suffered no long-term effects from the injury. Linda had called him a survivor.

He’d not only survived but thrived. Roger and Linda had had him for over a decade, and he was already an adult when they adopted him; nonetheless, this senior citizen kitty seemed to show no signs of old age. We joked that he must have found the “one ring” that had kept Tolkien’s Bilbo the hobbit so well preserved; we joked, too, that he’d outlive us both – which seemed particularly likely when his love of winding around our ankles caught us off guard and threatened our balance, including on the stairs (“Jackson, you’re not on our insurance policy!” was Matthew’s frequent refrain).

Despite the tripping hazard Jackson sometimes presented, we enjoyed his youthful spirit and playful ways. Every morning during colder weather, when Matt would sit on the stairs to put on his boots, he’d call out, “Jackson – bootlaces!” Jackson would come running to spend a couple minutes batting at the dangling strings that Matt would wave above him. Besides enjoying playing with Jackson, Matt also liked to play him: when he’d pick Jackson up and put him over his shoulder, he’d then give Jackson a gentle squeeze; initially, this was just meant as a friendly hug, but since each squeeze would elicit a “mrrowww,” Matt would start squeezing him in the rhythm of a song, which made it sound as if Jackson were singing. We called this “playing the cat-pipes.”

In addition to his playfulness, another way in which Jackson didn’t act his age was that he certainly had the voracious appetite more commonly associated with youth, especially when it came to canned cat food, which we typically give the cats shortly before we eat dinner. However, Jackson’s internal clock seemed more of the twenty-two- or twenty-three-hour variety, because he usually started his vociferous yowling whenever anyone came home in the afternoon – a tendency that occasionally got him banished to an upstairs room for a spell, until it was feeding time. (Now that he’s gone, we haven’t always remembered to give the cats their canned food, so I guess his rather strident reminders were more needed than we realized!)

Perhaps one reason Jackson was always so hungry was that he wasn’t always able to keep the food down. Soon after we took him in, we heard him make a strange noise, kind of like “Mmwowwwowwwoww!” “What a funny sound,” we remarked – just before he vomited copiously on the window seat. The next time we heard it, or heard the more common “Huckahuckahucka” sound, we knew to move him off the furniture or area rug, stat.

Puking proclivities notwithstanding, Jackson seemed the picture of health otherwise, so we assumed he was getting his needed nutrients. About a year ago, though, Jackson must have taken off his “one ring” that had kept him ageless, because we started noticing that he’d gone from slim and trim to scrawny. Petting him, we could feel his spine. This past winter, he took up a new habit: hunkering by our heaters. We told ourselves, well, he’s old, and he doesn’t have a lot of fat to keep him warm, and it’s been a harsh winter, and it’s not as if he can go to Florida like the human elderly, so the heaters provide him with the comfort he craves. We folded up towels and placed them next to the heaters, so Jackson’s old bones could lie on something softer than the floor. Even so, he still came running at the call of “Bootlaces!” And he still kept clamoring for food to anyone unwise enough to come home before 5:00.

It was only a couple weeks before he died that his running and clamoring stopped, and we knew then that something more than old age was troubling him. Kidney disease, the vet said – the same thing that had claimed the life of his similarly striped predecessor, Bocca. Armed with an IV bag and a YouTube how-to video involving a Scottish Fold who’d been getting daily IV treatments for years, we hoped we might be able to preserve Jackson’s life for some months, at least. The first two or three days, Jackson’s response seemed promising, but by the end of the week, that promise was clearly not going to be fulfilled. His eyes had done what I remembered Bocca’s doing – and Macska’s, too, just a few months ago: they’d become smaller and more triangular, and appeared to be almost all black pupil.

I knew we might be nearing the end, but was alarmed nonetheless to come home from school on Friday afternoon to find my husband only partially succeeding in holding back tears as he told me he’d made Jackson’s final vet appointment for 5:15. Initially, I wondered if Matt was being unnecessarily hasty, but while I petted our kitty’s soft, stripy sides and wept, those stripes began trembling violently, and I realized that Matt had made the right decision.

When we agreed to let Jackson into our home and our hearts, we did so with some trepidation. Would this substitute kitty live long enough and be sweet enough to repay our emotional investment in him? Would the benefits of adopting an older cat be worth the pain of losing him? Six years later, the answer was a definite yes.

“Have you seen the cute picture of the tiger kitty in the office?” Meredith asked me as she walked into my office at work. I had not, and she encouraged me to check it out the next time I was in the office. I did, and I saw a very cute adult tiger cat, sitting in a basket, and he was up for adoption from a colleague who had developed allergies after many years of living with the cat. I agreed it was a cute photo, but we had two kitties at home, so I did not give much thought about him.

“I miss my tiger kitty,” Meredith commented at home. A few weeks before, we had to put our tiger cat, Bocca, to sleep because he had kidney failure. “Uh-huh,” was my non-committal answer. I admitted the house seemed emptier with only two kitties, but I did not think we needed another one so soon after Bocca had died.

Wrong. Over the next few days, Meredith became more insistent that we needed another tiger kitty, and so I found myself driving over with Meredith to my colleague’s house to meet Jackson, our new tiger kitty.

When we met him, he was wearing a little red bow around his neck. We were told that the adult son of the family had thought he should look nice for us. We went back to the kitchen to pick up a few left-over supplies, and when we went back to Jackson, he had managed to get his bow off. I was rather taken by that.

We got Jackson home and slowly introduced him to our other two cats. He did not take it well. He spent much of his time, those first few weeks, hunched into a little ball on our rug in the hallway. I do not know why he felt safe there, but he did.

Jackson eventually learned to co-exist with the other cats, but as a sweet-tempered and somewhat skittish cat, he was easily chased around by the other cats that we had over the last few years. They all seemed to sense that he would not fight back, and so he became the chase-toy often.

Jackson was sweet (we have a theory that all tigers are sweet), and he liked to be near me and Meredith. If we were on the couch or in bed, that is generally where you would find Jackson. He also always remained young-at-heart. We think Jackson was about 10 years old when he came to our home in the fall of 2009, and he lived another 7 years. During that entire time, he loved to play. This was especially true in the winter when I would put on my boots. He would come running from wherever he was so he could play with my boot laces. He did that up to within two weeks of when he died. In fact, when he stopped playing with my boot laces, I knew he was really sick.

Jackson was declawed in his front paws, but he still had his back claws. In fact, he could not fully draw them in. This could get your attention when he jumped into or out of your lap, but in general it was funny because he sounded like he was wearing tap shoes on our wooden floors – he clicked wherever he went.

Jackson was sweet, but the one place he would drive me crazy was in the kitchen. If I was in the kitchen in the afternoon or evening, Jackson would let me know in a loud voice that he wanted to eat. We usually fed the cats canned cat food around 5:00 in the evening, but as soon as I got home, be it 3:00 or 4:45, Jackson was sure to start reminding me that there was no food on the floor for him to eat.

Jackson absolutely loved having his ear scratched. I could dig in behind his ears and actually start to lift him off his front feet, and he would purr away and start to roll his eyes back in his head. If I stopped, he would often grab my hand with his paws and drag it to his head. He was not subtle.

Jackson died on Friday, March 20th, 2015 after making our home a little happier for five-and-a-half years. We lost our first cat, Mascka, back in November of 2014, and with Jackson dying in March, we lost our cats that liked to snuggle. We still have four cats, and they are good company. But, I, with Meredith, miss my tiger kitty.

Rest in peace, Jackson kitty!