Mali Lošinj, Croatia -> Postijna, Slovenia

We all woke up early this morning and were in line for the hotel restaurant when they opened their doors at 7:00. We were worried about hitting a weekend rush to get on the returning ferries, and wanted to do everything we could to avoid long lines.  Although breakfast and packing went smoothly for the Geelses, poor Kael woke up with a steaming fever, followed by an actively upset stomach.  So poor Brie and Geoff scrambled, grabbing every spare plastic bag in the room before loading the kids in the car.

In our rush to leave the room, Dennis and I left behind the pillows we'd brought from home: we realized it before we were off the island (when I noticed that Alex had fallen asleep in the car, and I was trying to prop up his head) but it would could have added an hour or two, depending on how vicious the ferry traffic got, to go back and try to find them.

As it was, we had no problem getting on the ferry: they opened up a lower deck to the boat, and the trip was so fast that we couldn't finish even a single game of Uno.  Granted, our game was taking unusually long. Joey was playing.

We took a different route out of Croatia, hugging the coastline of the Adriatic, and we went through several very typical seaside towns with little vacation resorts and packed beaches. Still trying to make good time, we stopped at a grocery store to get bread and cheese and Nutella for lunch; the store, a Lidl, was awfully odd, with wobbly wire racks and a strange mish-mosh of food for sale. More than anything, it reminded me of a Midwestern Aldi.  But I think Lidl is the closest thing that they have to Costco in Europe, particularly judging by the gentleman in front of me, who was buying 48 loaves of sandwich bread.

Things we saw while waiting in traffic: that, my friends, is
a Three-Wolf Van.

We drove quickly until we approached the border between Croatia and Slovenia, where there was a rest stop right before a toll booth. The toll booth alone was slowing traffic, but people were also hopping off and on the freeway through the rest stop, just to cut ahead in the line: because of that blatant selfishness, our lane was almost frozen. Yeah. We were mad.

And, after waiting well over an hour, it turned out that the toll was only about a dollar.  For some irrational reason, it made us even madder that they'd made us wait so long to collect such a small amount.

Compared to that wait, the border check was ridiculously easy, and from there we drove swiftly all the way to Postonja, which Brie had added to our itinerary because of the cave system, which we'd planned to tour this afternoon.

We had a little trouble finding our hotel. Although it's called the Epicenter, it doesn't seem to be in the middle of anything but desolation. From appearances, five years ago someone had an ambitious vision, but all that's left now are a few clinging remnants. The hotel is located inside what used to be a mall; almost all the shops are empty, with crumpled paper and a few old sticks of furniture inside.  Really, the only thing in the mall that's still in active use is a bowling alley: to capitalize on that last asset, the hotel offers bowling packages: for five nights/four days, you, too, can bowl for up to four hours per day, with half-board at the hotel, for 148 Euros per person.

But we enjoyed different perks. For one, the hotel rooms were incredibly spacious.  Each kid has a full-sized bed to himself, and I think our bed might be as large as a California king. And, outside the hotel, there was a little beer garden and a playground that was once spectacular but now had a broken zipline, a teetering merry-go-round, and weeds growing in the rubber-top.  But in my kids' eyes, it was still spectacular.  They ran around and loosened their legs before we drove to the caves.

We just barely missed the 4:00 tour of the cave, and so we spent our free hour eating an early dinner and letting the kids browse the touristy shops that line sidewalk leading up to the cave.  I gave Ella and Alex each a five-Euro limit, and they dashed around, deciding what their wealth would buy after our tour.

On the list of things not to do in the cave.
I have to say, this one didn't occur to me.

There are a couple significant cave systems in Slovenia, but we chose this one, Postojnska jama, particularly because it seemed like it would be easiest with and the most fun for the children.  For one thing, at the start of your tour, you're put on a long train that zips you through two kilometers of gorgeous cave.  The train went very fast, and Joey, my seat mate, was beaming the whole time, exclaiming "WOW!" every time we entered a larger cavern. Ella, however, was a little nervous: I think the train reminded her a little of an amusement park roller coaster, and she was half expecting a pirate to pop out around every corner.  Indeed, the whole thing did seem a little Disneyesque, with a slick and fast ride through an improbably beautiful set of caverns, including one room hung with enormous glass chandeliers.

I took a little video of our ride through the caves, so that you can get the sense of what the ride was like.

I have to say, I really loved seeing these caves, and I enjoyed every minute of the walk through the caves: it's been years since I've been in a cave system, although my parents took us to several when I was small, including Mammoth Cave and Carlsbad.  I'd forgotten how beautiful and awe- and imagination-inspiring caves can be. And they're particularly delightful when you're seeing them with jaw-dropped kids.

The cave train

But, by the end of the ride, Ella had relaxed, and she stayed with Joey and me for the next two kilometers, our guided walk through the cave, while Alex spent some coveted father-son time with Dennis. Our large tour group was separated into five or six different languages, but our English-speaking guide did little other than warning us off from taking flash photography.

Although he did give us a just little bit of the history of the cave, noting how one particular passageway was constructed by Russian POWs during the first World War. He also talked a little about the geography of the cave, noting that there were three levels to the cave: the highest is too crumbly and fragile to tour, and the lower chambers beneath us are still being formed by the underwater lake.  But he invited us back to visit that set of caverns in about two million years.

For some reason, that joke really captured Ella's imagination, and she kept talking about the tourists that would be visiting the cave in two million years.

The cave had these long green cloaks
for rent at the entrance: all of the hooded
tourists lent a Tolkeinesque feel to the tour.

Ella's a budding rock-hound, and she'd never seen anything like this cave. How she loved it: she used adjectives like milky and sparkly and precious and amazing to describe the formations. Although she tended to view the cave with the eye of an entrepreneur, too, talking a lot about what the financial rewards for discovering a cave this size might be. And she kept using the phrase "harvesting the stalactites," wondering if the visitors, two million years from now, would be allowed to "harvest and sell" the stalactites from the then-crumbling middle cavern, the ones that she was forbidden to touch but were so tempting in all of their milky, precious glory.

Joey rode the whole two kilometers on my shoulders: it's where he wanted to be, and I figured as long as he was up there, he couldn't touch the walls. But Ella, at one point, told him "Um, Joey, let's just say, these aren't ideal conditions for a shoulder ride."  Indeed, he and I both did a lot of ducking to accommodate him, and when the ceilings were low, Ella too charge of helping me gauge how much room I had.

One interesting feature of the cave was an aquarium containing an olm, a blind, cave-dwelling amphibian. Outside the cave, they sold a fairytale book about the olm, describing a legend in which the lizard is actually a little dragon named Jami that was transformed by a wicked dwarf. It was awfully cute, and it was tonight's bedtime story for the kids.

At the end of the tour, we were released into a large cavern that included a gift shop, one that contained a clue as to what, exactly, the fiscal value of a stalactite harvest might be.

Yours for the low, low price of ten Euros

But Ella and Alex decided to hold out for souvenirs from the tourist village.  Ella bought a rock that had been shaped into a heart: it attracted her because it seems to glow with an inner light.  And Alex bought a tiny golden medallion, stamped with the cave's emblem.  Treasure.

And everyone got gelato.

Back to the hotel, I went into one of those few remaining stores, a housewares store, to buy replacement pillows, so that we could save ourselves a trek to Ikea.  The prices were unbelievably cheap, even considering the weak dollar, but the quality was...well.  I thought about getting a feather pillow, but it turned out they weren't selling down pillows: I could actually feel the the large, stiff quills of the feathers.  So I picked a different pillow, and also some containers of golden and silver pebbles that I'll scatter on a beach for my treasure-finders some fine day.

Meanwhile, the kids were scattered across the playground with Kael finally seeming a little better, while Dennis was enjoying a $2 massive beer. They made friends with the only other kids there, a brother and a 10-year-old-sister, and they all played freeze tag and Simon Says and chase until after 9:00.  The other kids had to go at that point, but they so sweetly asked if mine could come back and meet them there tomorrow at 5:00, please.  With $2 pivo and free entertainment for the kids, I was sorely tempted to say yes.  But...onward!

Ella, snuggling with Juniper