After all the trains of summer are gone
Sep. 4th, 2023 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I feel as if the whole month of August just ran me over like a train, between my mum's visit, trying to cram in a huge amount of work into a couple of weeks, two major renovation projects on our house (requiring dealing with contractors, etc), and then another holiday with Matthias. I've barely been around on Dreamwidth, and when I have logged in, I haven't felt I had the energy to comment on people's posts or reply to any comments that a post of my own might prompt. But now, finally, I have time to catch my breath — after returning from travel yesterday, dealing with the mountain of work emails that accumulated while I was away, and putting out various small fires caused by my own distractedness at work prior to the holiday. I've made a series of lists, which always makes me feel a whole lot better, and now I can sit here, and write about where I've been over the past week.
Matthias and I always try to have a holiday of at least a week together, away from home, doing something that's not visiting family (when both halves of a couple are immigrants, leave allocation often swiftly fills up with trips to visit family, since unlike people who live in the same country as their families, we can't very easily drop by and see our parents for a weekend). I've had an aim for quite a while now of travelling to at least one new-to-me country per year, although this is the first time since 2019 that that's been possible; while I travelled a lot last year, it was always to countries that I had visited before.
Matthias and I also have two friends who live in Vienna — and we last visited them in 2019 as well. We decided, therefore, to kill two birds with one stone, and go on holiday somewhere new-to-us that was reachable by train in a day from Vienna. After researching our options, we picked Slovenia, and booked a four-day stay in Ljubljana. We made our way there in fits and starts — an afternoon train trip to Brussels, a stay overnight in a budget hotel near the station, a day travelling across Belgium, Germany and Austria by train, and a weekend with our friends L and V in Vienna, during which time we wandered around the city, taking breaks from the heat in various cafes and restaurants, and took the train out to a village near the city, where we walked through vineyards and had lunch (and wine from those same vineyards), and finally a slow, six-hour train ride along rivers and mountains dotted with vineyards, sheep, and cornfields to Ljubljana. (We dubbed the train the 'Habsburg Express' because it started in Vienna, inched its way through Austria and Slovenia, and ended up in Trieste; travelling at about the speed you'd expect from a Habsburg-era train as well...)
The weather in Ljubljana was unfortunately not conducive to our preferred holiday activities — walking around an unfamiliar city, chatting with each other, and pausing for meals, coffee, or glasses of beer/wine — since it rained torrentially for the first two full days we were there. We made the best of it, however, and visited two contemporary art museums, walked along the river on both sides and in both directions whenever there was a break in the rain, and tried out almost all the restaurants, wine bars, craft beer bars, and cafes that had come highly recommended. My highlight in this regard was probably this cocktail bar, a tiny jewel of a place doing incredibly strange cocktails (or any classic cocktail on request) with exquisite attention to detail.
The highlights of the trip were definitely the restaurant in one of the turrets of the castle above the city, where we had a tasting menu with wine pairings (another thing we like to do in every new-to-us city), and the trip out to Lake Bled which we did on the one day in which there was no rain forecast. We walked around the lake (a flat paved trail of about 6km — easy walking, although quite crowded with families, tourists, and groups of cyclists), pausing to swim in the sparkling water, with the clouds and craggy mountains mirrored beside us — had lunch in a lakeside cafe, and made it back to Ljubljana in time for dinner. (If anyone is thinking of doing something similar, I'd recommend travelling by bus rather than by train as the train station is an hours' walk from the town; the buses leave every hour and are pretty cheap, although be warned you'll need to pay in cash.)
I took a huge bunch of photos on the trip, particularly of the lake, the water of which is full of the most unbelievable colours and textures. If you have an Instagram account, you can see them at![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
ronnidolorosa.
The return journey was a quite a bit more stressful due to chaos and cancellations on behalf of Deutsche Bahn (the cursed corridor between Cologne, Aachen and Brussels seems to be a particular problem, as exactly the same thing happened to my mum in exactly the same area on her train trips to and from Berlin in early August), and although it used to be possible to travel from Vienna to Cambridge(shire) in a single day by train, I now wouldn't recommend it, and indeed wouldn't recommend trying to do any trip that involves train travel through Germany and a Eurostar connection in a single day. We will not make that mistake twice, and will always stay overnight in Brussels or Amsterdam and catch the Eurostar the following morning. Eurostar changed our booking without charging any additional costs (my advice here is to follow what we did and not try to rebook yourself online/through the app, but rather go to the Eurostar gate and explain the situation; the staff member rebooked us immediately and didn't ask for any payment of any kind) and we should be able to claim back the cost of the hotel booking necessitated by DB's chaos, but it made what had been — up to Cologne — a relaxing, chilled out time zooming through central Europe on fast moving, on-time trains into a tense, anxiety-inducing nightmare.
In any case, that was a long digression about trains, which was not the note on which I meant to end things! The holiday itself was lovely, and in general it's just been so wonderful to be able to travel internationally again. I feel incredibly lucky.
Matthias and I always try to have a holiday of at least a week together, away from home, doing something that's not visiting family (when both halves of a couple are immigrants, leave allocation often swiftly fills up with trips to visit family, since unlike people who live in the same country as their families, we can't very easily drop by and see our parents for a weekend). I've had an aim for quite a while now of travelling to at least one new-to-me country per year, although this is the first time since 2019 that that's been possible; while I travelled a lot last year, it was always to countries that I had visited before.
Matthias and I also have two friends who live in Vienna — and we last visited them in 2019 as well. We decided, therefore, to kill two birds with one stone, and go on holiday somewhere new-to-us that was reachable by train in a day from Vienna. After researching our options, we picked Slovenia, and booked a four-day stay in Ljubljana. We made our way there in fits and starts — an afternoon train trip to Brussels, a stay overnight in a budget hotel near the station, a day travelling across Belgium, Germany and Austria by train, and a weekend with our friends L and V in Vienna, during which time we wandered around the city, taking breaks from the heat in various cafes and restaurants, and took the train out to a village near the city, where we walked through vineyards and had lunch (and wine from those same vineyards), and finally a slow, six-hour train ride along rivers and mountains dotted with vineyards, sheep, and cornfields to Ljubljana. (We dubbed the train the 'Habsburg Express' because it started in Vienna, inched its way through Austria and Slovenia, and ended up in Trieste; travelling at about the speed you'd expect from a Habsburg-era train as well...)
The weather in Ljubljana was unfortunately not conducive to our preferred holiday activities — walking around an unfamiliar city, chatting with each other, and pausing for meals, coffee, or glasses of beer/wine — since it rained torrentially for the first two full days we were there. We made the best of it, however, and visited two contemporary art museums, walked along the river on both sides and in both directions whenever there was a break in the rain, and tried out almost all the restaurants, wine bars, craft beer bars, and cafes that had come highly recommended. My highlight in this regard was probably this cocktail bar, a tiny jewel of a place doing incredibly strange cocktails (or any classic cocktail on request) with exquisite attention to detail.
The highlights of the trip were definitely the restaurant in one of the turrets of the castle above the city, where we had a tasting menu with wine pairings (another thing we like to do in every new-to-us city), and the trip out to Lake Bled which we did on the one day in which there was no rain forecast. We walked around the lake (a flat paved trail of about 6km — easy walking, although quite crowded with families, tourists, and groups of cyclists), pausing to swim in the sparkling water, with the clouds and craggy mountains mirrored beside us — had lunch in a lakeside cafe, and made it back to Ljubljana in time for dinner. (If anyone is thinking of doing something similar, I'd recommend travelling by bus rather than by train as the train station is an hours' walk from the town; the buses leave every hour and are pretty cheap, although be warned you'll need to pay in cash.)
I took a huge bunch of photos on the trip, particularly of the lake, the water of which is full of the most unbelievable colours and textures. If you have an Instagram account, you can see them at
ronnidolorosa.The return journey was a quite a bit more stressful due to chaos and cancellations on behalf of Deutsche Bahn (the cursed corridor between Cologne, Aachen and Brussels seems to be a particular problem, as exactly the same thing happened to my mum in exactly the same area on her train trips to and from Berlin in early August), and although it used to be possible to travel from Vienna to Cambridge(shire) in a single day by train, I now wouldn't recommend it, and indeed wouldn't recommend trying to do any trip that involves train travel through Germany and a Eurostar connection in a single day. We will not make that mistake twice, and will always stay overnight in Brussels or Amsterdam and catch the Eurostar the following morning. Eurostar changed our booking without charging any additional costs (my advice here is to follow what we did and not try to rebook yourself online/through the app, but rather go to the Eurostar gate and explain the situation; the staff member rebooked us immediately and didn't ask for any payment of any kind) and we should be able to claim back the cost of the hotel booking necessitated by DB's chaos, but it made what had been — up to Cologne — a relaxing, chilled out time zooming through central Europe on fast moving, on-time trains into a tense, anxiety-inducing nightmare.
In any case, that was a long digression about trains, which was not the note on which I meant to end things! The holiday itself was lovely, and in general it's just been so wonderful to be able to travel internationally again. I feel incredibly lucky.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-04 01:42 pm (UTC)I've really enjoyed seeing your travel pics on Instagram! Gosh, there's nothing lovelier than the vineyards outside Vienna. *is nostalgic*
(We dubbed the train the 'Habsburg Express' because it started in Vienna, inched its way through Austria and Slovenia, and ended up in Trieste; travelling at about the speed you'd expect from a Habsburg-era train as well...)
You must have felt like you were in a Stefan Zweig story!
I am sorry about the train nonsense at the end, but it sounds like a wonderful holiday and I'm so glad you got to take it!
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Date: 2023-09-04 05:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2023-09-04 11:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2023-09-05 03:53 am (UTC)But it is a beautiful country, from the photos I've seen. (You took some lovely photos at Lake Bled.) I was just reading about the Postojna Caves with the olms, in Postojna, about forty minutes or so from Ljublana. The capital is the place for history and culture, but the caves seem to be The Place for exploration. There's even a train inside the caves! And a castle built into the rock! That would be where I would ideally spend my time, in my hypothetical visit to the Motherland.
=^..^=~
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