Next morning’s wake up was no different that the previous one’s …. still rainy. We weren’t discouraged though, perhaps due to the fact that we were already used to it. We ate our breakfast in the luxury dining room of the hotel, while staring at the lake’s view outside. We decided before starting heading northeast (with a final destination Vienna) to take a look the weather forecast, through the internet. Since we saw that the Alps continued and would continue to be heavily clouded and rainy, we decided to start moving South, to Slovenia.
If we got the SS167, the road would stop at a point, near the village Buckstein, where we would load the bikes onto a train, which would transfer us to the other side of the mountains, at the village Mellhnitza, in 20 minutes. At least that was the information that we got from a very polite girl in a gas station. We liked the idea of getting the train and so we started through SS167, heading for Buckstein. The rain and the cold through the route were becoming painful. After approximately one hour, we reached Buckstein. 4 cars were in front of us, where they were waiting to get their ticket.
We paid 10€ per person (along with the bike) and waiting, while it was still raining. After 15 minutes, the train came. I would like to point out, that once it came, at first, we got a little bit scared, since once we saw the bandwagons, we noticed that they didn’t have a roof. We thought that we were supposed to travel along with the bikes, through the trip. Luckily enough, we were wrong, since the first wagon of the train had sits for the passengers.
We didn’t even count 15 minutes, and we had already gotten to the other side of the mountain, where, in our surprise, had sun and not even a cloud ! We kept on driving through SS106 until we met Autobahn A10. We followed A10 till Krumpendf. Krumpendf is a very social and idyllic place, right next to one of the biggest lakes in Austria. Inside the lake there were many boats that were touring around, while there were also people enjoying swimming. While driving around the lake, we ended up at an area named Maria Wirth. We stopped there at the cafeteria of a hotel and enjoyed our coffee, while timidly we were removing our raincoats. The heat and the sun brought us back to reality once again.
After relaxing for some time, we continued our trip to Slovenia and more specifically to Ljubljana (the capital). We followed Autobahn A2 and after a while we got on the A11. 50 kilometers later, we reached the borders, where after showing up our passports (without even taking the helmets out), we entered Slovenia. Right after the borders, we would enter a new and big tunnel, around 8 kilometers in length, which was finished during the end of 2006. The ticket to the tunnel and to the Autobahn after, was 1,6€ per person. The distance from the Slovenian borders to the capital is approximately 85 kilometers, where the highway is new and big, but at one place is being cut off, continuing on a provincial road for about 15 kilometers and right after that, you enter the big highway again.
Entering Ljubljana, the city reminded to Nikos about Romania a little bit. The neighborhoods at the province of the capital had almost all the same style, those gray multi-layered buildings. While still proceeding at the center of the capital, the city was getting more beautiful. We decided to stop and rest for a while near the city’s historical center, at a central cafeteria, where it was gathering lots of people. We didn’t sit for a long time, because we had to find a room to stay. Finding a room proved to be a very difficult task. After many circles around the historical center and asking many hotels, we managed to book a 3-bed room for 110€ per night, for 2 nights, at a hotel which was around 6 blocks far from the historical center. The receptionist willingly suggested to us to put the motorcycles on the back side of the hotel, inside their open-space restaurant, which had garage-doors that locked every night.
During the night, we decided to get out, to see the city center better. The historical center was being cut from a central river. The boundaries of the historical center are relevant to the placing of the historical castle of Ljubljana, an imposing medieval castle, which is speculated that it was first mentioned as an existence around 1.140 A.D. Alongside the river, the place was full of shops, bars and restaurants, beautifully built and decorated. We sat at one of them to have a drink and stare at the people around us. Later on, we got lost for a while at the small alleys around the river’s main roads, but we got onto track again and decided to eat something. We then returned to the main square to have a second drink, at “Bachus Lounge Bar”. The bar was very attractive, but unfortunately, weariness got us all, so after a couple of hours, we had to return back to the hotel in order to rest.