Our travel experience with kids had so far been … a bit turbulent. But albeit things were going the right way (yay for apartments!). In Dekani we stayed in a wonderful apartment. There was a nice patio, under the vines, they had fresh vegetables and fruits (which they gave, so I could make some fresh soup for our little guy), … They also had – and luckily for us / and maybe them as well – scorpions. Who would have thought there would be scorpions? To be honest: they were really tiny, a few centimeters BUT STILL, we never saw one before, let alone two. One in our bedroom, and one in the hallway. And we discovered them, thanks to our sun. He woke up around 4 AM, didn’t fell back asleep easily, so I decided to breastfeed him. While my eyes were still adjusting to the lights, I saw a black shade on the wall. It looked like a scorpion and everything in my head screamed ‘scorpion’, but I still didn’t want to believe it. I thought it was a spider with its legs in a strange way :-). So I calmly yelled for the boyfriend (;-)), who didn’t had his glasses on. I said “there’s something on the wall…”, the boyfriend was moving closer to the shade. And at the same time his nose could touch the animal, “is it a scorpion”, he yelled and jumped on the bed. It was a scorpion. An European black scorpion (or the yellow-tailed scorpion). They’re not dangerous. But again… we hadn’t seen a scorpion before in our lives, AND the days before, hours before (!) our sun was just playing and crawling on the floor. So we were a little spooked, to say the least. We switched sides of the bed (so I was away from the scorpion), the boyfriend caught the scorpion in our bedroom under two or three pots (you could never be sure enough) and didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.
We were very happy to get away from there :-).
Strunjan Nature Reserve, Izola & Skocjanski Zatok Nature Reserve
But before all those tiny beasts came out to play, we had a wonderful time there and visited a few places in the area.
We started out with the Strunjan Nature Reserve. I wanted to visit Moon Bay, which they said to be a secluded beach. Well, it was so secluded we couldn’t find our way to it. We only saw it from above, when it started raining. It was around 9 AM and there were already people laying on the beach and swimming. In the rain. I mean… so far ‘secluded’. We also had to pay (again) so we were tired of all that and just took some pictures of the sea and went away, back to Izola. We found Izola a charming city. But there wasn’t a lot to do there. We saw a lot of boats, took a little stroll around the city and ended on the pebble beach, which was crowded. We found a little place where we could let our son feel the ocean with his feet … before we returned back home.
In the afternoon I still wanted to do something more, because what a boring day was this? It didn’t get much better, but we visited the (free!) Skocjanski Zatok Nature Reserve, the Mediterranean wetlands in Slovenia! They were rather dry though, but it was quiet, with not much people walking around. We liked it, just because of that.
Croatia
Dekani and the southern region of Slovenia lies very close to the border with Croatia. So why wouldn’t we want to visit Croatia? Maybe because of the traffic jam to enter the country (passport checks!) and maybe because they don’t use the Euro (didn’t thought of that one) and we hadn’t any Kuna with us… but still, we did it. Wasn’t so special thought. We visited Poreč, which we liked. It was a charming little town, with a loooooot of people, and some good restaurants. After that I wanted to go the Kamenjak National Park. I thought that would be one of the high points of our trip. Yeah, no. Guess again. What a trauma we had there. We had to pay for the entrance, in cash. So we had to drive to the nearby village, to get some money (or change Euros), then go back, and with 45 minutes to spare (I didn’t want to arrive back home, too late) we wanted to take the dinosaur walk. Problem 1: we couldn’t, for the love of God, find the start of that walk. I think we drove around the whole National Park, before we FINALLY saw the starting point. Problem 2: the route wasn’t so clear, once you started walking. So we took the wrong turn, ended up at our starting point, did not see any of the things I wanted to see and returned home angry, tired and frustrated. Had I known all of this, I would’ve just revisited Pula and Rovinj again. I do not like Croatia at this moment.
Portorož & Piran
Our final day was actually the best day of the three… Could’ve spend more days in Triglav had we known this…
On our final day, we parked our car somewhere in Portorož, I think the first parking lot we saw… and we walked alongside the shoreline towards Piran. The hightlight of that area. And it really was! The walk towards Piran was though, it was hot and our son started weighing a lot in that baby carrier 😉 – we had to make sure he had enough milk to drink, we had enough water to drink, he was in the shade – when there was shade … But it was all worth it. More, because we left rather early, so we had a fairly quiet walk towards Piran and back to Portorož as well, because everybody was going the other way by the time we went back ;-). In Piran, we visited the walls, went to the old church and walked to the end of the city. Although it was crowed (and people find the funniest places to go sunbathing), we really enjoyed the buzzing little city! Definitely a place worth visiting! If we didn’t had our baby with us, and if it wouldn’t be so crowded everywhere, we would’ve easily dropped ourselves somewhere as well, to go swimming in the water, eating in a restaurants, drinking something on a terrace… But we can’t do that with our son. If we go to a restaurant, he needs to eat as well. The whole team during the meal… same with the drinking. He can’t sit still for two seconds. So, for everybody’s peace, we just stayed there for a short amount of time. That’s something that really bugs me. It’s nice to go on a vacation with the family, and the three of us… but it didn’t feel like a normal holiday. In which we relax, drink, eat, do anything we want. It is an adjustment. But we lived, we managed, and we had three whole weeks together (tiring weeks, but still).
After Dekani we left and went back up, to Kamnik. Read all about it in my next post.
Around the world in a lifetime 