Hi friends – a short and sweet one for y’all today, in (belated) honor of Valentine’s Day and my never ending love of Slovenia (oh…and the guy who drove me through the whole country). In August, Dan and I spent 11 days driving through Slovenia and it was one of my favorite trips of all time. Honestly, every time a Slovenian athlete comes on the TV in the Olympics now I’m like “I LOVE SLOVENIA!!!!”
I’m sitting in the backseat of a dirt-covered truck, pressed between my 6 foot tall boyfriend and a very large Slovenian man. In the front seat, our driver (another large Slovenian man) and the passenger (yet another large Slovenian man) indistinguishably yell to each other over the loud crunch of rocks beneath tires. I stare straight ahead. To my right, the cliff edge and a sheer fall down the mountains. To my left, sharp bend after sharp bend of mountain road, the not-knowing of whether another car will be hurtling toward us at each corner. Our driver bangs the dashboard of the dusty truck with his fist, and my attention is drawn through the window. Briefly, I see a small figure whip by, at least a hundred meters above us, on a thin wire. “That’ll be you” our driver yells, this time in English. I can feel my stomach clench. It’s early morning, and we are driving up a mountain in order to throw ourselves off it. We are heading to the largest zipline park in Europe to go ziplining with Aktivni Planet, and I’m questioning my sanity.
It didn’t take much for me to fall in love with Ljubljana, Slovenia: a hug of mountains circling the city, an expansive farmers market, the purest tap water, even vending machines lined with locally produced milk, yogurt, and juices. It would be hard not to feel your heart flutter as you take in the blue canal peppered with paddleboarders, the skyline of red roofs, and inhale the smell of clean, crisp air so unfamiliar in a European capitol.
In Ljubljana, we spent the night behind bars, locked into the cell of a political prisoner.
As the sun sank, there was no view of the night sky, but rather just the navy-painted ceiling and my imagination. In the darkness, I could hear the distant clangs of other barred doors locking. Hours later, through one small square window chiseled in a meter of stone, the sun rose.
