THE WHEEL DEAL!
It’s Slovenia’s scenery and prices that will take your breath away on this cycle break
SURElY, if Prince Charles was ever to come back in another life, he would return as a farmer in a national park nature reserve in the Slovenian Alps. Breathtakingly beautiful wildflower meadows. Hay cut by hand and draped to dry over a medieval timber rack
(kozolec). Self-sufficient homesteads with beehives. Tidy, square vegetable patches that grow enough produce to last a family a year. Folklore galore. Slow pace of life.
It is no exaggeration to say that Slovenia is one of Europe’s last secret special places. And there’s no better way to sample this gentle former Soviet Bloc country than trundling on a bicycle tour through the valleys of the Julian Alps, the south-eastern end of the mountain chain that stretches across Europe and, in the opposite direction (west), to lyon in France.
Our holiday with Inntravel encompassed five days and six nights, cycling an average of 20 miles a day, largely off-road on well-maintained paths.
Day one was an easy pedal around lake Bled. Often used as the totemic image of the area, it has an island in the middle with a 15th-century church. The unreal colour of the water is just like the sapphire blue on holiday postcards, whose manufacturers fake it by enriching the tones of the sky and sea.
Then, lunch of soup served in a bowl made of bread (£2), couldn’t-be-fresher grilled trout (£10) and a £13 bottle of wine at the Gostilna Vintgar restaurant in a gorge a few miles away.
Some in our family who had opted for electric bikes glided serenely up the impossibly steep hill to Bled Castle, while others, defeated by the gradient, hopped off and pushed!
Electric bikes may be frowned on by ‘proper’ cyclists, but they are a revelation. Press the ‘turbo’ button on the handle-bar and...whoosh, anything is possible.
They’re heavy (55 lb), but who cares when you can go turbo? And they’re expensive to buy (more than £2,000), but a joy to hire on holiday.
Every day, we were given a detailed itinerary with map instructions. Even so, we got lost in forests a couple of times. It would have helped to
have had GPS maps downloaded to our phones — a facility which Inntravel says it is set to introduce.
like many guided cycling and walking holidays, this one began with the dodgiest hotel (a communist-era place in the woods, which claimed to be the ‘first zero-waste hotel in of Slovenia’, assorted with refectory meals dumplings).
WE Moved on to a plush spa hotel and ended in a Renaisnce sance manor with a seven-course tasting menu for dinner, which our children said was all ‘foams and dust’. luggage Inntravel through On day to the move on each day. arranges for your two, we cycled Triglav National Park past so many butterflies and orchids that you might expect coachloads of visitors sponsored by Kew Gardens, but we hardly saw a soul.
We picnicked among purple