Adijo,Mijo...Again!

The first time we drove to the Slovenian coast back in February of 2011 was the first time I drove here.  We had rented a three-ton mini-bus with a manual transmission to get the five of us and my parents there and back (yes, there was a better way…like buying seats on an actual bus).  With my lack of stick-shift skills and knowledge of where I was going along with Slovenian road rules, I spent the entire trip praying I wouldn’t kill us all and I didn’t enjoy a second of the trip.  Even worse was the possibility of getting stranded and missing Super Bowl XLV later that evening, which became a real possibility when I nearly burned out the clutch as we inched up the steep hill from the coast behind a long line of cars.  Only by the grace of God did the story end up with a much happier ending.

Our trip to Piran the past couple of days was much different.  We drove down to see our friend Mijo, who is one of our favorite people from our first stint in Ljubljana.  Mijo has since moved to Piran, then to Germany, and now back to Piran for better job opportunities.  More importantly for him, he has finally brought his family from Macedonia to join him after many years.  And they literally just arrived, a day before we got there.

We spent the entire day with them Thursday, and it was wonderful.  He has a beautiful family.  Sy got to hang out with two really cool older boys, and Celia and Rosetta got to play with an adorable little girl named Dora (yes, like the cartoon).  We did a lot of catching up, ate a lot of food, and then headed for the sea to play in the waves.  We even got an official invitation to Macedonia, which doesn’t happen to us everyday.  By the way, it wasn’t difficult to pick out the five-some on the beach from Minnesota…Mijo said they refer to folks like us as “Cheese” because of our semblance to blocks of white cheddar.  Funny local humor, I guess. 

The one glitch in our trip was that we decided to cram in a small hotel room with one king-sized bed, which meant that I slept at the foot of the bed below the three girls while Sy slept under the desk.  When I awoke at six this morning to a swift kick in the head after trying to get comfortable on a four-inch by four-inch decorative pillow all night, I realized I'm too old for that kind of thing now.  The saving graces of the hotel were its hammocks and its pool…the pool is where we spent all of Friday morning, and where Celia and Sy both found out they can actually swim and motored around the pool for two hours straight.  Pretty fun to watch.

When we finally left this afternoon, I managed to get us up that hill with no hiccups.  And besides the occasional snores, the drive home was completely silent.