Dragons, butterflies, and Cockta.

Everything I knew about Slovenia I learned from Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, which amounted to knowing its capital.

Ljubljana.

We wouldn’t visit Ljubljana until the end of our cycle tour. Like many international airports, Ljubljana Airport isn’t even located in Ljubljana. Kranj is the closest city, and that’s where we ended up on day 1.

It was an 11 and a half kilometre ride to our hostel: the best ride of our trip… so far.

In addition to not researching the country beforehand, I also did not research the accommodations. That’s right, I was a passenger princess. I consider these blog posts my biggest contribution to the trip.

Our first accommodation was Hostel Cukrarna, which translates to “pastry shop”. The hostel has 4.5 stars on Google reviews, a 9.6 rating on booking.com, and five smiley faces on a sign outside the building. There being just four of us, the best we could give was four smiley faces.

Just barely. I was feeling under the weather and as soon as we arrived, I’d already resolved to get a good night’s sleep. Still, I didn’t want to go into quarantine immediately. Unless I have the flu, my appetite sticks around even when sick.

So, we set out to discover Slovenian food. Given its proximity to Italy, Hannah had accurately guessed there would be many menus featuring pizza. Between the four of us, our dietary restrictions were: vegan (Hannah), halal (Fatema), and lactose-free pescatarian (me). The only dietary restriction Ed had was: no toxic food. (However, as he and I learned one night in London, it is Hannah who is the most likely to eat mystery fruit off a tree.)

Here’s scenic Kranj:

We settled on KluBar Gastropub, where the only Slovenian offering on their menu was Cockta.

It’s made with a blend of 11 different spices and herbs. Like the KFC Original Recipe!

A few of Cockta’s slogans over the years, translated into English, are:

“The Drink Of Your Youth and Ours”

(3 years later)

“Still the Best”

“You Drink Cockta!”

Over the next few days, it became apparent that Slovenian slogans either don’t translate well into English, or inventing slogans isn’t their forte. The slogan for Slovenia is:

“I feel Slovenia.”

I wasn’t feeling it that night in Kranj, so I headed straight for the hostel after I ate. Our room at the hostel came equipped with an electric tea kettle. I tore open a package of Lemsip that Hannah had given to me as we left her and Ed’s place in London. Hoping this hot lemony elixir would cure me, I lay down on the bottom bunk and put a bra over my face.

I slept with a bra over my face every single night in Slovenia.

Day two was a 44km ride to Bled. The route involved 831m of elevation gain, which is a fair amount of climbing, even by my standards. The previous night’s Lemsip wasn’t the miracle remedy I needed; however, the hills to Bled did not defeat me.

Before our trip, we had agreed to stick together, but that plan quickly fell apart when we realized we all had wildly different natural cadences. We decided to adjust our approach: each of us would go at our own pace and regroup along the way.

Our first proper climb of the trip–complete with switchbacks–ended in the village of Podblica. At that point, it became clear that whatever illness I had was not any variation of COVID. It was a typical, run-of-the-mill cold. Yay? I bypassed the nasal congestion with a lot of mouth breathing, which is how I usually handle those climbs anyway.

Just before the photo above was taken, Hannah shared a story about a hiking trip in which she found a tick attached to her abdomen, likely there for hours. I pointed dramatically at an unidentified bug bite on my leg, giving the picture oomph. Then, just as we were about to mount our bikes and zigzag up some more hills, I stepped in unidentified animal shit. My right shoe was good and caked up with poo. I urged Ed and Hannah to go on without me as I needed to stay behind to chisel my cleat clean with twigs of diminishing sizes.

The delay resulted in my next favourite picture of myself from that day:

Ed had mapped out some gravel sections for our tour, but this wasn’t one of them. When I first saw that the road had been blocked off for construction, I hesitated to keep going. I hadn’t yet passed Ed and Hannah, and I doubted I could have missed them if they had turned around. Finally, I hit a section of a climb that I simply could not manage, so I dismounted my bicycle. Looking up and seeing Ed taking a picture of me put a smile on my face. If you zoom in on the picture, you’ll notice the sign in the background indicating the 17% gradient of the hill, and next to me, the guy operating the excavator looking down at me as he sucks on a cigarette: judging me Slovenian-style.

At that point, I was already low on water. Ed had mounted an extra bottle cage under his downtube to carry an emergency water supply. Alas, he hadn’t filled it up given that we were only doing 44km.

You can pinpoint where I set out alone to find a source of water ASAP and forgot to turn my Garmin back on:

Those were some thirsty 7 kilometres. Fortunately, only 2kms of that was uphill.

I zipped the rest of the way to the village of Kropa, stopping just short of a water fountain. I was apprehensive about going any farther because Road 635 branched into several main streets leading up to the town center. I stayed and waited by a wrought iron dragon, thinking about the day I turned my nose up at the wrought iron section of the V&A Museum.

Ed was the next person to make it down to Kropa. Hannah, he said, had stayed behind to wait for Fatema to catch up. Unlike me, the UK crew had access to Slovenia’s mobile network bands. I was carrying an AirTag linked to Ed’s iPhone, but in a small town like Kropa, that was marginally better than having a helium balloon tied to my wrist. Anyway, now that Ed had joined me, we didn’t have to worry about losing track of Fatema or Hannah.

We found the aforementioned water fountain about 15 meters away from where I’d waited. We were also hungry and agreed to hit up Slovenia’s ubiquitous grocery chain, Mercator. Ed and I differed from Hannah and Fatema in that we were both content with eating grab-and-go garbage. I hadn’t yet learned the Slovenian translation for “lactose-free,” so I was relieved to find that the label on this bottle of “food” from the enticing brand Yfood was in English. Y not?

It didn’t pair well with the energy drink I’d also picked up; I wish I’d taken a picture of it because it was the jazziest can design I’d ever seen. Never mind the taurine; with water, micro, and macro nutrients, and 26 essential vitamins, I had the strength to make it to Bled.

Day two was now the best ride of our trip… so far.

Here’s an assortment of pictures taken by Ed of our July 7th adventure: