SKOFJA LOKA: FIRE & ICE

t’s Christmas day and Natasa and I have it alone-together.  Natasa suggest we walk around Lake Bled I tell her I also want to go on the river walk that has all the bridges, VINTGAR GORGE.

I last visited Lake Bled on my original bike tour through Slovenia, it was fun to come back.

After a full day of adventure hiking and walking, were not done.  I’m driving and suggest we go into Ljubljana for the Christmas lights.  There’s a river cruise, so the tourist in me says, let’s go for a boat ride.

Meanwhile back home, it’s snowed and the sledding hills are showing themselves in Skofja Loka

You can tell by the last post Christmas was awesome.  The excitement didn’t end there.  I had the flu so on New Years we stayed at home watching The Grand Budapest Hotel.  We heard this big explosion, looked at each other? WTF?  Being it was New Year’s and there were plenty of “real” fireworks and explosions that night, we shrugged it off and  went back to watching the movie.  A few minutes later, we look and see this.

Soon the entire apartment is engulfed in flames.  The first 3 fire trucks only had extension ladders.

From our window you could see the whole thing unfold.  One firefighter stood on the ground using a hose, that couldn’t reach the fire, it would have been funny if it wan’t potentially so tragic.

They thought they had extinguished the fire, and brought the ladder down.  From our vantage point we could see the fire had started up again.  They raised the ladder again and extinguished the flames again, they did that twice.
The next day we learned that the guy committed suicide by lighting a room full of natural gas.  I talked with the neighbor yesterday, he said he saw the explosion, a blue flames shooting out the windows and the whole roof had lifted up.

We got some sunny winter weather and I was able to bike around .  People ask how do you ride when it’s -3?  I always say, it’s like going skiing, you just wear a few extra layers and off you go.

I”ve never actually lived where you could or had to bike with snow all around.  I have 5 layers on,

Surly sent me some parts for my bike and told me to go to Pici Bici  to have it fixed.  They had some cool bikes and other bike stuff.  They specialized in refurbishing old bikes and are the Surly representatives in Slovenia.

They had a bike with a sharpening stone attached.  You removed the bike chain and attached the grinder chain to the front sprocket, start pedaling.  I think something like this could work really well at on of Portland’s many Farmers Markets.

RIDING THE SNOWY BACKROADS CAN BE CHALLENGING, YET LOTS OF FUN TOO.

I wanted to get a clock for the living room wall.  I shopped on ETSY for bike clocks, but with shipping it was going to cost $50 easy.  So I was in the Chinese shop at the mall and bought a clock for 8 euro.  I  also bought a bike shoe box at the same store a couple weeks ago.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE JABBA THE HUT?

i didn’t take a photo of Natasa cleaning up and stomping down the last of Jabba the Hut. It took 3 weeks to melt.

The stories that I planned to write about this time will have to wait till  next time.  There is so much to share about living here in Skofja Loka, Slovenia and best of all with Natasa.
MORE PHOTOS HERE

Thanks for reading.
People People where are the comments?
JEFF

NEXT? Farmers market, walking bridges  politics, and?