How shall I describe Slovenia? It’s beautiful. It’s, to use a much overused word, unspoilt. It’s as if the 40 odd years of Tito’s communism, left the country untouched and throughout that time, people kept doing what they’d always done. So everything is ‘unspoilt’ by chemicals, intensive farming, urbanisation.

There are vast forests of deciduous forests, acres of wildflowers which nod at you from the verges as you drive past and huge towering, timeless mountains.  There seems to be only one really large town, the capital Llubjana, otherwise it’s all hills, mountains, rolling rivers and meadows. It’s a great place for outdoor pursuits and also just to relax in the wonderful quiet.
To see the country properly, you need to drive around. As you go through teeny tiny villages, with wonderful window boxes of geraniums splashed against white walls, you sometimes get grumpy looks from older people and you wonder if they preferred it in the good old Tito days, before all these foreigners came swanning round in their Audis and their Volvos, waving their iPhones around. Or maybe that elderly person is just having a bad day and her arthritis is hurting……? Don’t get me wrong, just about every Slovenian we met was very welcoming and pleasant, speaking copious amounts of English, putting me to shame.
To see the country better and more easily, we ditched Bertie at the campsite and with a little prance of her wheels, set off in Lottie to see our surroundings. Boy did Lottie enjoy it, without fat old Bertie on her back. We positively zoomed around the bends. We had leapt up at dawn (well 7 a.m.) to go to Bled and avoid the tourist hordes. We stopped briefly to go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at the beautiful lake and then on further into the countryside and Lake Bohinj. On and on we went, up and up into those towering mountains and as we did so, the underlying theme of ‘shorts’ continued. For we encountered cyclists who seem to love riding up the steepest of mountains: in the hottest of weather, on the tightest of bends (grrrr!) that is where you will find your cyclists clad, yes you’ve guessed it, in Lycra shorts with bulging thighs and muscly, sometimes ageing calves. There was one couple that looked like Hans and Lottie Hess on their bikes…I think they should have stuck to the flippers…
And logs! If you want logs, come to Slovenia. I saw one place which would have provided enough logs for the rest of my life and probably my grandsons’ lives too.
And where you have wood, you will get…..yes sawdust but also wood carvings. The Slovenians and even the northern Italians seem to be very keen on those rather lumpy wood carvings, like owls and eagles which you sometimes get in….laybys. Not really my cup of tea but I suppose you have to do something on a long dark winter evening, when you’re housebound with all the snow and have a few logs readily to hand….
Returning to base and the resentful Bertie, we were pretty shattered. You can have too much of a good thing ie hairpin bends, after all. After a refreshing swim in the chilly waters of the river Sora, we opened the fridge only to be knocked sideways by the reek of the garlic sausage we’d bought. You have to be fond of your friends and family in Slovenia….
And so we passed our time, chatting to our nice Dutch neighbours, fighting with the rather rustic showers, watching the zipliners and rafters, swimming in the bracing river, visiting the pretty, nearby town of Radovljica, reading, writing. It was a great place to relax.

Our last night at that site was challenging: a Dutch family, anxious to have a riverside pitch, pitched their tent hard up against us and we ended up with their guy ropes over our awning ropes and a tent halfway under Bertie’s overhang. It was a bit like coming down your stairs one morning, to find people camped out in your living room. ‘What’s for breakfast Ginny?!’ We were all very friendly and nice but it was a bit of a grrrr moment.
After the trials and tribulations of the Dutch Land Grab, we headed, yes, right again, over the mountains via the Vrsic pass, complete with cyclists, all the way to 1600+ metres. It was a good drive, all 25 hairpins of it but the top was like Land’s End, full of cars, souvenir shops, cafes etc. We kept going! And then down, round the remains 25 bends, praying that the brakes would not overheat and finally stopping with a faint smell of burning and to our great relief.
We spent a happy time in the Triglav Park: think high mountains and deep gorges with rivers which run turquoise between the narrow openings, where people swim and kayak. The mountains in Slovenia are truly vertiginous in places and indeed quite oppressive in some areas. I was glad when the landscape opened out a little as we headed towards Italy. The river Soca was the front line during World War 1 and the Slovenians and their allies beat back the Italians to retain control of their land. Today, you drive down a narrow lane, one car width wide and you cross into Italy, past a small, abandoned border cabin.
At which point, as I leave Slovenia, I will leave you too.