Wet and wonderful-Slovenia

Mauel tapped on Austin's window. I was sitting in the back reading in an effort to stay dry. Underneath the tent a puddle had formed nearly the size of Lake Bled itself. The thunderstorms predicted hadn’t really kicked in but the rain had been merciless for days. My friendly Dutch neighbour wanted to know if he could interest me in some coffee and brandy to get warm. He certainly could.

Lake Bled

Mum and Dad had come here to climb the Triglav Peak in the national park and stopped only briefly at Bled before heading down the road a little to Lake Bohinji which was within closer striking difference. I stopped at Bled.

Mum and Dad at Lake Bohinji, 1967

The journey over from Austria had turned out to be far more stressful than the comparatively short distance would suggest. There had been a single day of sunshine and the heat made the valleys an inferno. By the time Austin and I had crossed the border and arrived at the back of the queue (for the tunnel through the Alps) Austin was the hottest he’d ever been and having driven up and down all those hills who can blame him. It was now that he chose to overheat. Not in a fantastic lift-the-bonnet-masses-of-steam sort of way but in a silent stalling way. I was left with two choices as we inched along a car length at a time. Either let him stall and hope that he would restart or tap the foot break, dip the clutch, give a quick rev and then use the handbrake to do the final slowly. It was a very hot and stressful 55 minutes.

The Staff at Camping Bled were great and really friendly and the other campers quickly adopted me when the humour of my tent predicaments stopped being funny. In nearly two weeks I had had only one night's fully dry night’s sleep and that had been the first one. Mauel’s neighbour Leo gave me a tarpaulin and I entered into a world of refugee chic. And thank the heavens he did, because it just poured down. In the end, surrounded by new friends, I hung around at Bled much longer than I planned just waiting for that first sunny day to dry everything out.

As a man who would name his three favourite bands as 1.Radiohead, 2.Talking Heads and 3.Radiohead again, Cliff Richards' Summer Holiday was always going to be a challenge. Yet it was with Sir Cliff that I sped through the moutnains and swept down in to Bohinji looking for the spot where Jimmy's photo was taken.

The ride was apparently 20kms and then a few more around the lake. After searching through the wooded shores looking for the beach (single men stepping out of the bushes with a camera are rarely welcomed on beaches) I stopped a girl working at one of the campsites and showed her the image. She just shrugged and said that they had been so much rain that most of the beaches were underwater at the moment. Great! So I searched on a while longer startling sunbathers and weathering their frowns and glares until I thought I had found the spot. I waded out into the glacial waters and instantly lost all feeling in my feet and slipped over. I then proceeded to repeat this graceful act at three other sites before finally calling it a day before I lost all feeling below the navel.

Here's one that got quiet a lot of frowns.

On to Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia

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Have a good week folks

Cheers Matt