Croatia Pics!!

Paris, Venice and Slovenia

PARIS

From Madrid we flew to Paris and spent three days exploring the city. On the first day, Col directed us on a grand walking tour of many of the sights such as the Grande Ville Hotel, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Pantheon, the Latin Quarter, Luxemborge Park (where it was challenging to dodge the pigeon poo from the trees above!), St Sulpice, the Louvre, the Champse Elysee, and the Arche de Triumphe.

On the second day we took a long walk along the Seine and then visited the top of the Eiffel Tower to enjoy the amazing view over Paris. After coming down from the Eiffel we sat in a lovely little park beneath the tower and had a romantic dinner of a tin of lentils messily combined with a tin of spinach! Oh well, we thought it was close enough to strawberries and champagne! As we walked across the bridge away from the tower and looked back at it, we were pleasantly surprised to see the tower all lit up with twinking lights. It was really magical.

Overall Paris was a really beautiful city with amazing historical monuments and sights and we enjoyed our time there although we found it to be very expensive, even after living in London!

VENICE

We arrived late at night in Venice, Italy, and headed for our accommodation which was a cabin in a camping villiage, a short boat ride away from Venice itself. In the morning we took the ferry to town and began exploring the city. What can we say? It was so so so beautiful!! Narrow, winding, cobbled streets lined with small shops mostly selling handmade Venetian Glass or masks weaved their way over canal bridges and through the city. The Saint Marco Basilica is a prominent feature in the main square and is just gorgeous with its stunning architecture and ornate decoration.

We made sure to fit in a yummy pizza and wine meal and sampled some magnificent gelati! Verdict: Highly recommended, very beautiful and romantic, even moreso than Paris.

SLOVENIA

We caught a train from Venice to Ljubljana, arriving in the evening. We found our accommodation then set out searching for some dinner and stumbled upon one of the most beautiful cities we had ever seen, where things were actually affordable and people were very friendly. The city lies beneath a towering hill with a medieval castle on it and is centred around a flowing green river which is crossed by several cobbled stone bridges. We were very pleasantly surprised to find a great pub where we could have dinner and drinks for barely over 5 euro or 9 dollars AU. The next day was a public holiday so everything was closed and we just mosied around town and walked up to the castle as well as planned our travel for the next few days.

Bright and early the next morning we hopped on a bus to lake Bled in the Julian Alps. The mountains surrounding the lake are all snowcapped, there is a fairytale castle perched high on a cliff overlooking the lake, and an island in the middle of the lake with an old church on it. We spent the first day walking around the lake and also doing some really nice bushy walks up some of the surrounding hills overlooking the lake.

The next day we took a bus to Lake Bohinj which was as if not more beautiful and far less touristy. We did a 16km walk to a lovely waterfall along a gorge with turquoise rockpools. The setting was unbeatable.

In all we really really loved Slovenia and would highly recommend it as a great travel destination. It is so small its really quick and easy to get around and had good links for getting to Croatia which is where we headed next.

Will continue with our Croatia trip soon....

Col and Ang, xo.

Croatia so far

Slovenia