The mission today was to visit Triglav National Park, Slovenia’s only National Park.  The weather was a little rainy but that wouldn’t stop our little Polo from climbing up a mountain.  There were 24 hairpin turns on the way up and 26 on the way down.  (So I drove 100 hairpin turns today by the time we made our way back.)  The park was peaceful and not busy at all.  Maybe the rain had something to do with that but that doesn’t stop me from walking around.

The road was actually built by Russian prisoners of war during the first world war.  They built a chapel on the road up and there are a couple of burial sites there from a avalanche.  There were some fresh candles on the grave.

Half of the hairpin turns were cobblestone to help get a better grip on the road.  This is also why I pay extra to rent an automatic car. 🙂  The road actually wasn’t that bad and every turn was numbered and gave you the elevation.  When we reached the summit there was a little hut restaurant.  The temp got down to 6.5 celsius at the top of the mountain.  This is also a popular route for bicycles however due to the weather, I only saw 2.

We did one hike in the middle.  Well we thought it would be a nice hike but really we were just following another tour group thinking that there must be something down a trail.  Little did we know that there wasn’t really much to see that you couldn’t have seen from driving further down the road.  We climbed down for 40 minutes only to come to the road.  Naturally the tour group only hiked down as their bus picked them up at the bottom and that left us as the only suckers having to climb up.

(In the photo of just the face of the mountain see if you can find the image of Ajda.  Adja is a mythical village girl from local lore.)