Slovenia....Who Knew???

Island on Lake Bled and Bled Castle

Domestic Bliss

Sunset in Piran, Slovenia

We spent the past four days in Slovenia, and it was pretty awesome. Who would have guessed that? Before this trip, I had a vague fuzzy sense that Slovenia existed somewhere in the world, but obviously wasn’t worth my (or anyone’s) time. Well, I’ve changed my tune. Note to everyone: go to Slovenia ASAP. We started our trip at the northern border, coming from Austria. This part of Slovenia is full of mountains. These are the Julian Alps, I guess they are kind of mini-Alps. We went to Lake Bled, which is a tiny lake, and got a room instead of camping since the forecast was terrible (as usual). It was the best choice ever – we had our own kitchen and bathroom as well as bedroom since there was no one else staying there at the time. The only caveat – we had to step into a time machine and transport ourselves back to the sixties. Or maybe the apartment had been transported into the future because it was still 2010 in the outside world. It was like a trip to Grandma’s house, and we loved every minute of it. We cozied up in our little wood-panelled hideaway while the wind and rain howled and watched the made-for-TV movie of the story of Shania Twain (no joke). After the movie, we switched over to a replay of a Canada-Italy World Championship game (no joke). I think Slovenia has a secret crush on Canada.

We then headed for the coast of Slovenia on the Adriatic Sea (again, who knew??). There is only 45 km of coastline, with Italy on one side and Croatia on the other. It’s pretty wild that within 200 km, we had gone from the chilly mountains to the warm winds of the Adriatic. With such a small coast, the tourist trap density is sky-high. The coast was nice, but overpriced, we jetted after only one night.

On to Croatia!!!

Welcome to Croatia, Gully and Elise – not one hour into the country, and the tollbooth guy tries to scam us poor Slovaks (according to our licence plate, we are Slovak of course) by charging us a ‘special price’. Gully with his quick wits says “No Thanks’ to that. Vergully 1, Croatian toll collectors 0.

23 Going On 30

Soooooo, the Space Star has already done us proud. She’s successfully navigated the cutthroat highways and back roads from Bratislava to Prague and on to Graz, Austria – which brings me to my next anecdote: as we rolled in to my buddy’s flat (yes, I’m trying to sound European by calling it a “flat”), we were greeted by a university pre-party that was just getting juiced-up to go to Graz’s kick-off-the-summer-get-wild-then-regret-it-the-next-day university party of the year. (BTW, not relevant, but Graz is the town that the Governator hails from). Anyway, as anyone who’s ever been there knows, Jaegermeister prac-tically flows freely from the taps in those Ger-man-speaking countries, and this party had – no joke – 15,000 people who were loving every drip of it. It was as if Elise and I went back in time to 2004 McGill and so we partied like we were 23. Ahhhh to be young again…….

That’s not a predicament in of itself. But, as we jumped into my buddy’s compact BMW 118 to take a trip into Austrian wine country (seriously, Austria has wine country – and it’s a heck of a lot more scenic than Ontario’s), I grabbed a slice of plain bread from the loaf that had been slow cooking in the Space Star for the previous two days. I needed something to keep my stomach from imploding. (Also, I was already getting used to eating plain bread for the odd meal during extenuating circumstances on the road). As I mentioned, it was a plain slice of bread, but after half a slice I remarked upon a bluish- green topping that covered nearly an entire side. Yup, mould. “A little mould never hurt anyone, right?” I asked Elise. “Of course not”, she said. She was wrong (for once!) After an hour of cruising the windy European roads I gave the final notice to the driver in that serious, pithy way when you know the “upcoming” event is imminent. “Pull over. Now”. Let’s just say you should avoid all Austrian 2010 vintages from now on as some poor vintner’s crop GOT IT GOOD from The Gool. It wasn’t the placebo effect and it wasn’t the combination of the tortuous mountain roads of the European backcountry and my day-after-huge-party state of being. It was the mould. I swear.

-G

P.S. Big shout-out to Andy for letting us stay in his "Pension Huber"!

Slovakian Auto Bizarre

To buy a car, or not to buy a car. That is the question that preoccupies all backpackers when they travel to Eastern Europe, right? Ok, maybe not. Typical backpackers might settle for travelling on buses, overnight trains, discount airlines etc., but Elise and I wanted to do something original. Turns out that the idea to buy a car, drive it 10,000 km around Eastern Europe and sell it back again is so original that it seems no one has ever done it before! Ahhh, such trailblazers we are.

Warning: do not attempt to this hair-brained scheme unless you have hook-ups at European auto bazaars or you are filthy rich. In the latter case you’d be better off renting anyway. Yes, renting is very doable if you have the cash, but once you’ve forked over your life savings for the insurance coverage in countries like Bosnia, Serbia, Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania, you’ll realize that for the same dough you could have spent a year in Southeast Asia eating caviar and foie gras whilst getting fanned with giant palm leaves by beautiful women (or men).

Buying a car in Europe and getting full insurance coverage for every country seemed fairly straight forward and affordable when we researched it from back home. There was even the prospect of selling the car for a profit at the end of the road. I began to realize it was a bit of a crack-pot scheme when our idea garnered looks of astonishment and disbelief from locals and other backpackers alike. Turns out you need to be a resident of the country where you buy the car and you can’t sell a car in another country before un-registering it in the first country. Furthermore, you can’t register the car in the first place until you do an emissions test and safety certification. Then you can go about getting your insurance coverage. In other words, it works pretty much the same way as in North America. Duh. So there I was, sitting in a hostel in Vienna for three days straight in the sweltering heat calling every auto bazaar from Munich to Budapest, looking for a way around.

I caught a break when an ex-colleague of mine in Herzogenaurach, Germany got in touch with his colleague in Kysuce, Slovakia who had purchased a used car from a guy in Bratislava who owns an auto bazaar (www.rhr.sk). Romco (pronounced Rom-cho) is his name, selling cars is his game. Apparently, Romco was willing to sell us a fully certified, legitimately registered car with full insurance in Eastern Europe - AND buy it back after three months! Well, turns out Romco speaks no English and neither does anyone else at his auto bazaar. After several very short conversations in Slovak with, (which were mostly just non-sensical utterances by me followed by long and awkward pauses on the other end), I finally got a hold of The Elusive English Translator, Jana. (Big shout-out to Jana here!!). Jana, who happened to be the ex-girlfriend of Romco, was gung-ho for us to buy a car and willing to translate the deal. Knowing only the price of the car and nothing else, we took off on a bus to Bratislava first thing the next morning.

Long story short (too late), we spent the evening in Romco’s office along with two other Slovakian men drafting a bilingual Slovak-English legal document outlining the sale, complete with conditional clauses and legal jargon (Shore-C, I could have used you!). Romco managed to find a way to circumvent the system and basically give us a short term lease with a massive security deposit. The end result is that Elise and I are the legal owners of a stunning 2001 Mitsubishi Space Star (what kind of a name is “Space Star”?). Let me just say that this tinted-out beauty is way too expensive and nice for our purposes. I originally assumed all we could get over here was a car that was made in a country that doesn’t exist anymore! But hey, we didn’t come all this way to do things half-assed. Let’s just hope it holds together in the Turkish backcountry.

G

European Road Warriors!!!!!

We haven't done much vacation-type stuff in the last week because we have been in car hell. But it's finished, and we are the proud owners of a little blue Mitsubishi Space Star! Apparently, only one was ever made because we have yet to see another one on the road. We are taking suggestions for her name....

Gully will tell the story of how we came to be in possession of such a beauty, it was quite a wild ride. Props to The Gool for a job well done.

-E

The First Few Days

We’ve officially been on the road for four nights and already there is way too much to write about. Our first two nights in a dorm room in a hostel just served to remind us how much we want to get off the backpacker’s trail and start blazing our own trail. We are pushing 30, we are too old to be stuck in bunkbeds in a room full of other people in bunkbeds, waiting for the girl from Kansas to finish her 100-minute shower so that we can use the bathroom!!

It’s interesting, though, to see what has changed in the backpacking world since the last time I was in it (6 years ago). One huge change is that so many travellers have laptops now. We thought we would be so cutting edge with our little red netbook, but it’s the norm now. Goodbye Lonely Planet books, hello Lonely Planet website! Even the campgrounds have Wi-Fi.

We were still stuck in Vienna trying to figure out this car thing (more details on that will come from Gully), so for our third night, armed with a brand new tent and new therma-rests, we made it to a campground in the outskirts of Vienna. The first two days of the trip had been sweltering - a sitting-in-your-underwear-in-a-hostel-dormroom-with-five-other-people-and-not-feeling-embarrassed-about-it-at-all kind of sweltering - so it made perfect sense when I saw the storm clouds forming as we travelled by bus to the campground. As we arrived at the bare grass field that passes for a campground in Europe, the sky turned green and the wind started howling. You can close your eyes and just imagine our panic. We put up the tent (for the first time) while lightning flashed all around us and the wind whipped debris into our eyes, and managed to finish setting it up just as the sky let loose and started pouring.

And it has pretty much been raining ever since.

-E

Vienna Autocamp 'Wien West'

Bratislava Autocamp 'Zlate Piesky'

Viennese Urban Workout

The Day of Departure Has Arrived!!!

Thanks again to everyone who came to our good-bye party on Saturday - it was an awesome time!

Our bags are all packed, and our plane takes off in just a little while. To all our friends and family and avid blog fans, there is just one thing to say... Stay In Touch!! And read our blog religiously.

The next time we post, we'll be somewhere far, far away.

-E

Tick Tick Tick....

No days of work left. Actually, 2 days of non-work have passed. Very weird, the rest of the world is carrying on with a regular work week, and I’ve got nowhere to be…. 8 days until departure. We’ve managed to reduce the to-do list to 5 million things to do. Our jobs have ended, we’ve moved out and moved all our stuff into my uncle’s place (Thanks again Tony!!!!) I’ve been chilling in Sault Ste Marie with relatively little stress while poor Gully runs around Toronto running thousands of errands.

Let me just say this… dreaming about leaving your life behind to travel the world definitely sounds exciting and romantic (especially after a few cocktails) but in reality, it’s a bitch. I’ve spent probably a total of 15 hours on the phone trying to cancel phones, internet, etc etc, listening to customer service jerks tell me about their 30 day cancellation policy, and changing mailing addresses (back to my parents… when will I ever grow up???) which apparently, for many companies, involves providing a DNA sample and a stamp from a notary.

But coming home from work for the last time on Friday was a true moment of elation – one we had been dreaming about for months – and I’ll probably never forget it. There was definitely a lot of shrieking (from Gully, of course), and some shots of amaretto.


-E