Day 5 Tuesday May 12

Belgrades tallest building. This building wasn’t bad, but we found the Brutalism style of architecture to be less appealing than the 17th and 18th European style.

The cost of fuel was expensive. with Deisel at 8.92/gal.  Our guide was proud to say that Danube longest river in Europe and the  Yugo car was made in Yugoslavia in the 80’s. It was his first car and he loved it. According to Google it was the second worst car ever made. Trabant, a German car, made the bottom of the list. 

There were Trucks as far as you can see waiting for the border crossing from Serbia to Croatia. We breezed through with just two passport checks. 

 

As we rode along suddenly the bus started swaying back and forth. We experienced such strong winds they shook the bus and we had to stop on the side of the road. Wind gusts  In excess of 30 mile and we were an hour and a half away from our hotel. It was a bit scary. After waiting a bit and seeing the temp drop to 40°, I was dressed in sandals—Brrr.

 When we were able to continue, we picked up a local guide and opted for a dry, warmer bus tour of Ljubljana instead of the walking tour. Our local guide, Nina told us of the constant wars and corruption and how the area suffered Economically from this until 19th century.—the Golden period. 

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The scenery improved as the rain stopped and visited Grad Otocec, a 5 star  Michelin Castle. We visited the interior and learned we could opt for a room there at nominal price. The economy room was $545/night and went up to $1700/night. We fed the ducks around the Castle instead.

 

What a change in scenery we had after the castle. Beautiful rolling hills that looked a lot like Switzerland.

  

At 8:30 we were happy to find dry, warm restaurant 145 ft from our hotel.