Slovenia: Bled and the Vintgar Gorge

On our final day in Slovenia, we joined up with our tour guide, George, to visit Lake Bled, Bled Castle, and the Vintgar Gorge. Unfortunately, the weather was not very nice throughout the entire weekend and this day started out no different. It was incredibly foggy, as you can see in the picture below. Here dad is sitting up at the castle and he should have a view of the lake - but all you see is white.



Slowly, the fog began to lift. First, we could see the hills on the other side of the lake and, almost an hour later, the little island in the middle of the lake (Slovenia's only island!) started to come out of the fog:



Meanwhile, on the other side of the castle, there was almost no fog (it was just hanging out over the lake) so we got a nice shot of the Alps.



To allow the fog to fully clear before returning to Lake Bled, we passed a few hours at Vintgar Gorge, which is a 50-100m deep, 1-mile long gorge near Lake Bled. It has wooden walkways lining most of it (a well-kept trail after the wooden walkway ends), and has been open to the public since 1893. It's a really beautiful walk down (and back) the gorge to the final waterfall where the gorge ends. Below are some pictures from our walk. We hit the fall colors just right, which made it extra special.



After walking through the gorge, we ate lunch at the restaurant at the top of the gorge. I'm not sure what its name was, but the food was good. Nothing spectacular, but a good place to eat if you're hungry after the walk. Their potato salad is delicious.

After lunch, we drove back to Bled and stopped at a few places around the lake to take a few scenic pictures of the lake, surrounding mountains, Bled castle high on the hills, and the island in the middle of the lake. You can either hire a boat to take you out to the island (14 euros per person, so quite steep), or you can rent a boat and row yourself out to it. We did neither of these, as we didn't feel the view from the island would be any more spectacular than the view from shore. Plus we didn't want to spend the money to take the boat, and our guide was insisting on rowing us there himself if we hired a rowboat, which we weren't excited about.

Anyway, here are some of the views of the island in the lake. The first one also has the castle in it, up on the hill just to the right of the church on the island in the picture.



And views of Bled Castle up on the hill from various angles:



After taking some pictures, we stopped at a restaurant where they serve the famous Bled Cream Cake. It was delicious! The service at the restaurant left a lot to be desired, but the cake was worth it. The picture below doesn't show the cake very well, but it's the only picture we took. The castle is in the background!



After eating all that cream and sugar, we then went for a walk around the lake. We didn't go all the way around because by then it was getting quite late and the sun was setting, but it would be easy to walk all the way around. The entire way is a paved trail that is wide and nearly flat and it's only about 4 miles around the entire lake. With the fall colors, it was one of the best parts of the day! I would imagine walking around the lake is quite crowded in the summer though, as when we did it there were quite a few people but I wouldn't say it was crowded. In the summer, however, it may be unbearably crowded on a nice afternoon.