Bled Castle (Grad)

Today we took the bus to Bled to see Lake Bled and it's surroundings.

We boarded the bus and endured the bus driver's inability to use his right foot on the accelerator pedal to propel the bus forward with any sort of decent momentum.

Eventually we arrived at Bled and walked down to the lake.

We were blessed with …

You know absolutely nothing at all about a country, not even the name of the capital city, so the question is how on earth do you pick a place to visit...Well that's obvious, you google Slovenia, click on the pictures tab and the best looking picture on that page is that place you are going! I thought this was possibly my brightest idea of the …

Early in the morning we went to the salt fields. Since it was the off season there weren't any workers there but it was still really cool to see. We got to take a tour with our guide (who showed us the whole city throughout the week) and see a video with the process of how the salt is harvested. It was really crazy to see the huge white piles of …

On day 12 (second last day of this tour), we travel by train from Budapest back thro' Vienna to Bled (approx. 9hrs), situated on the stunning Lake Bled at the edge of the Julian Alps in Slovenia.

There are many outdoor activities to get the blood pumping in Bled - rafting, caving, canoeing, swimming, rowing, hiking, to name a few - or …

After waking up we headed out to the bus station to get a bus into Bled, a small town in Slovenia just over an hour from Ljubljana. The journey itself was very scenic going through plenty of fields n mountains.

We then arrived and had a bit of a mission trying to find the accommodation we had booked- Andrea's home, as we had no map or …

Had a buffet breakfast from Alexsh at our B&B (again probably overdid the face stuffing) so headed to the lake to walk it off. Did the circuit all around the very picturesque setting and then took the trail to hike up to the castle. Here we learned about press printing from the olden days and AP was very impressed by where 'upper and lower case …

... Slovenia were okay. I can be mildly entertained by just about any museum with informative descriptions of the exhibits. Like at Bled Castle Museum, the explanations were in Slovenian, English, German and Italy. One interesting fact I didn't know is that ...

... guys who walked up from the lake looking like they were about to have heart attacks, I knew I made the right decision. Bled Castle (Blejski Grad), dates from at least 1011, although it underwent several renovations due to a few earthquakes ...

... had people leaving all afternoon and by dark was only 20% full. We did all the touristy stuff on and around Lake Bled. We visited the castle on the hill. We swam in the lake. We went to the Vitgar Gorge which was our highlight. A 1.6 kilometre ...

... in Bratislavian hostel that really spoilt our time there we made for the hills (literally). Our train from Bratislava to Bled went via Vienna and then on into Slovenia. Seemed a round-about way to go but as we got to spend most of the trip on a clean ...

... . In all, the drive from Salzburg took about 2.5 hours. I think the drive cost us about 25 euros in tolls. When going into Slovenia, one of the immigration officers let us know that he was not Pro-United States and tried to scare us a bit. It had ...

... charlotte cake which was a vanilla mousse with raspberry sauce. We ate on the terrace with views of the lake and castle. Lowlights of Bled We had a rather unpleasant meal at a restaurant called Gostlina Pri Planincu. The place was full of flies, the ...

The train journey from Munich to Slovenia vindicated our decision to travel the world only by land. Gazing out of the window, 5 hours flew by as the train snaked alongside the Julian Alps before climbing high into the mountains and dropping us at the ...

Off to Bled, and Lake Bled, which is in the north west of Slovenia and in the Julian Alps, which are actually named after Julius Ceasar.  I hopped on the bus for the one and a half hour journey which took us through some great Slovenian scenery, ...

... is a tiny little island. Perched above the lake on a hill is a castle all scenically set in the Julian Alps. So obviously the castle and the little island had to be checked out! We climbed up to the castle in the morning and of course by the time ...

... off from the sights, as we wanted to have that hike fresh on our minds. For our last day in Bled we headed up to Bled Castle.  The skies were very ominous but we hiked up the hill anyway.  The castle itself dates back to 1004.  It now houses a cafe, ...