Velika Planina and Predjama Castle

Wednesday and Thursday of this week, we rented a car and took a couple of day trips.  The first was to Velika Planina (“Big Mountain”), which is a series of herdsmen villages on the Austrian border at the top of, well, a big mountain.  To get there, you need to take a cable car about half way up and then an archaic ski lift the rest of the way.  When we got off the cable car and saw the ski lift, our initial reaction was, “No way.”  But the lift operator said, “No problem,” so against our better judgment we decided we’d try it.  Chantelle and Rosetta hopped on a chair and the other three of us got ready for the next one.  With two kids and a backpack, getting on was as difficult as I anticipated, and we had to bail on the first attempt because Sy wasn’t going to make it on board.  But the second try was the charm, and with Celia on my lap white-knuckling it and Sy next to me thinking he was pretty cool we finished the trip up.

Velika Planina is quite a unique place because it’s not a tourist trap.  It is literally just small villages dispersed around the top of the mountain.  Huts, people, and cows.  No electricity, no SuperTarget, no Apple Store.  There aren't even any signs anywhere, so it’s not obvious what you’re supposed to do once you get to the top, other than walk around avoiding both the cows and their pies.  In fact, it took us a good hour of walking to find a place to get a bite to eat.  Living there would be an isolated existence to say the least, but the people there looked very content.  The cows did as well…it was sort of amusing that the fences were around the outside of the huts to keep the cows out, rather than around the cows to keep them in.  So, many of the cows just hung out more or less right next to the huts, while others roamed around the mountainside.

On Thursday, we visited Predjama, one of Slovenia’s more well-known castles.  It is built into a cliff and many of the rooms and passageways are actually caves.  The castle is about 800 years old and is complete with a huge cave at the top, where we speculate the dragon and/or giant live (we were careful not to wake them), and a dungeon at the bottom.  There was also a medieval version of an Exersaucer (see below).

The most famous occupant of Predjama was Erazem, who made his living in the 15^th century robbing Habsburg estates and killing Austrian nobles.  When the Austrian emperor put the castle under siege, Erazem held out more than a year by getting supplies via a secret passage (legend has it that he would use the passage to buy cherries from a village nearby and pelt the Austrian soldiers with them).  Legend also has it that eventually he was betrayed and killed by a cannonball while using the castle toilet.

The kiddos had a lot of fun on the trips, mostly riding up and down the mountain (other than Celia, that is), and going on our dragon hunt.  Of course, no trip to a herdsman village or a robber-baron’s castle would be complete without ice cream, so that was a highlight as well.