Saturday, May 30, 2025
Our Barbo Palace room is surprisingly conducive to sleeping and we both woke up well rested. Sadly, they don’t serve breakfast, so we followed their recommendation and went to a little French themed restaurant. Nathan had the English breakfast, and since we’re nearing reentry to our normal lives, I had yogurt with fruit and homemade granola.
Our plans for the day include touring the Ljubljana Castle and Jože Plečnik house. After that, Nathan decreed we were going to sit at a cafe and do nothing but people watch.
We got done with breakfast, and went back to our room to organize ourselves for the day. The Jože Plečnik house does not open until 10 am, but the castle opens at 9, so I quickly bought tickets online and we walked up to the castle.
The castle had a few lookout towers, a penitentiary, a surprisingly fun museum of Puppetry, and a museum of Slovenian History.
One of the lookout towers had a glassed in lower level with the various peaks and elevations marked and we had fun looking at Triglav and the mountains from where we had hiked.
The castle ticket includes a funicular ride down, so at the end of our visit we rode down into town.
We were down from the castle before noon, and set off to mail a postcard to Nathan’s parents and grab sandwich fixins from the SPAR market. We walked back to our hotel and had our sandwiches in the inner courtyard of the palace.
We have no plans for tomorrow, so Nathan started looking into day excursions from Ljubljana. There’s a cave and castle combo about 50 kilometers from here, easily accessible by bus, but we decide its a pretty big day to see them and then also get ready to fly out the day after.
After lunch, Nathan had us walking south along the river walk, away from the most touristy areas of town. We stop for refreshments at a cafe near the Jože Plečnik house, but we do not stop to take the tour. Instead, Nathan reads his book at the cafe, and I sit quietly, having finished the book he packed for me.
My book was good, ok, not stellar, and although we’ve not bought any souvenirs, my bag is bulging, and I don’t wish to take it home. We passed a ‘Library Under the Treetops‘ on our way to the cafe, so after we left the cafe, we asked them if I could leave the book with them. I’m not totally sure they understood, although in general we’ve not had any language issues this trip, but we left the book with them and skedaddled out of there before they made me take it back.
From there, we ambled back to our hotel. We never did get to the Jože Plečnik house, even though we were right there. Instead, we sat in our Palace inner courtyard with a glass of malvazija, and chatted with some fellow travelers from Toronto. They are at the beginning of their trip, so we shared what we had seen and done, and they shared their itinerary. Also DINKS, but no dog, and a few years older than us, we swapped travel stories, the good and bad, and chatted about current events. We said “I’m sorry” over and over and apologized for things that are not our fault. We also explained that we were concerned about getting back in. (Who wants to get back in?)
By 6 pm, everyone was hungry and ready for dinner, and we said our goodbyes and had dinner at the wine and tapas place right around the corner from our hotel. It’s Friday night, the city is packed and so is the restaurant. We don’t end up getting a table, but instead sit on the stone steps surrounding the place and had our dinner there.
An ice cream and saunter through the market area later, and that’s all she wrote for this Friday in Ljubljana.
