TDE2017 – Day4: Ljubljana, the one we love

We’re greeted by the new day with many little rays of sun filtering in through the Italian-style rolling blinds. A fully charged TWIKE awaits us outside.

With a deep blue sky, our Venetian villa looks even more grand than it did yesterday.

 
We drive to the ferry port and are on the ferry within 10 minutes – happy to have not had to wait too long. It is a pity that we are unable to get on the smaller ferry to Edolo. It would have shaved off an hour of our trip today.

 
As always we’re immediately surrounded by people wanting to know what this strange vehicle is. After about 10 minutes we’ve satisfied everyone’s curiosity and head up to the bar to get a cup of fresh coffee.

 

 
Ahh, with this out of the way, we head out on to the passenger deck and enjoy another view of Venice city.

 
Before us are about 90 kilometers of pure flatness. As last time on this road, this is a rather boring part of the trip. With everything being flat, there are no reference points which would suggest we’re covering any distance at all.

 
At least the weather is nice and we come across another bar with extremely good coffee. 😉

 

 
Close to Palmanova, we see our first electric car outside of Switzerland – a Kia soul electric…from Zell am See in Austria. This car is, like us, a long distance EV.

I’m really happy to see not only more and more EV’s on our roads lately, but also owners taking their cars further and further!

 
After an interminable stretch of flatness, we finally see some hills: Slovenia!

 
Just a few kilometers later, we cross into Slovenia.

 
Immediately, we start climbing again and in no time we’re back to 1000m altitude.

 

 
We arrive in Ljubljana shortly after and check into our hotel which is just beside the old part of the town. The parking garage has three Tesla destination charging booths – time for me to get a Type2 plug for my TWIKE – I had to creatively re-purpose a plug for my needs.

 
I haven’t been to Ljubljana for 22 years and was looking forward to visiting the town again. Ljubljana is the winner of the prestigious European Green City award 2016 – and it shows. The center of the town is now completely car free and most of the buildings have been lovingly restored.

 
The vibe here is super-relaxed. The people here seem very happy and are extremely polite, helpful and cheery. I really like what they’ve done to revitalise the city.

 
My daughter and I first walk along the canals, visit an art exhibition in the city centre and then turn our attention to Ljubljana Castle. (it is a matter of honour that we walk up the hill!)

 
The renovation of the castle is an outstanding piece of work – it perfectly merges the old and new whilst keeping the original vibe and enabling new uses – must see to believe!

 
We continue to explore the castle and discover the lovingly curated puppetry museum which my daughter liked very much, since it is set up as an interactive museum: anything not behind a glass pane can be touched, tried, explored and played with.

 
I got my share of art, as we discovered another interesting art exhibition with innovatively lighted pieces of art – impressive.

 
With all these activities, our day is over in no time. We head to a restaurant to eat some typical Slovenian food and then head back to the hotel, where we then choose to relax a little at the hotel’s spa & pool.

 
Thoroughly relaxed, we get back to our room where, finally, after 3 days of constantly having to be creative in getting my entries out to the blog, I have a decent connection to both the internet and my server at home.

 
Blogging is fun again and I can back up the pictures we took.

 
Tomorrow, we have a very long stage of TDE2017 ahead of us – 300+ km to lake Balaton. Looking forward to it!