A beautiful day at Lake Bled

Lake Bled! A gem set in the Julian Alps, with a smaller gem of an island within it (Slovenia’s only island) topped by a small church. Munchkin dreamed of swimming to the island. Maybe we would also take a boat and rent bikes to circle the lake, and we would certainly swim at the beach, while Joy had her Kindle along and would enjoy a day of rest.

It was a 45-minute bus ride from Ljublana, a trip that lengthened considerably because when we walked over to the bus station, the 11 am bus we had planned on was sold out, as was the next. With an extra hour on our hands, we got a predictably mediocre bus-station-adjacent snack (though my crepes were quite good), then got aboard for what turned out to be a 75-minute ride, because the bus took city streets and made several stops along the way. We finally arrived at Bled; walked down to the lake, which was as gorgeous as advertised; got another snack because that’s how I roll, Munchkin chafing at the bit; paid the €10 apiece for me and Munchkin to enter the desired beach; popped back out to the ticket office to get a locker key (€3); put our things in the locker; and, as we spread our towel on the luscious grass by the swimming area, felt the first sprinklings of rain.

A few minutes later, we saw the first lightning.

It became clear that waiting it out might mean a very long wait. So we moved on to the biking plan. Biking in the rain, while not the most comfortable activity, was at least not life-threatening. Who knows, maybe the rain would even have stopped by the time we’d circled the lake, and we’d get to the island after all.

The bounce had pretty well gone from my bungee by the time M and I went back up the small hill to the information office, which lo and behold, doubled as an outdoor-equipment rental company, including bicycles. It was pouring. Absolutely pelting down. I wasn’t excited about a bike ride in these conditions, but damn it, we had left R & K’s apartment more than three hours earlier. We had invested a lot in this trip and we weren’t going to just get on a bus and go back to Ljublana. Nor did I want to spend the afternoon sitting in a cafe, reading and drawing, however pleasant those activities normally are. The cheerful and helpful young woman at the bike office empathized, got us set up with bikes, helmets, locks, and a backpack (“It’s better to get ours wet than yours,” she said, storing my backpack and its paper contents in their back office), and encouraged us to wait in the office for a lull in the storm.

A lull wasn’t really in the cards, but when things went from “utter deluge” to “steady hard rain,” we got on the bikes. And within a few minutes, the heavy clouds in my heart dispersed completely. After all, there’s a release in the fact that once you’re totally soaked, you can’t get any wetter. The lake, mountains and island were still beautiful, and although the temperature plummeted (not a bad thing in itself after the heat wave), as long as we were moving, we were pretty warm. Going through the puddles was fun. I don’t bike often, but I’m always so happy when I do, as it’s the closest experience I have, or am ever likely to have, to flying. It would have been fun to bike around the lake together under any circumstances; the tribulation turned a pleasant outing into a grand adventure.

Joy’s entire plan for the day was to sit around reading, so she was relatively unaffected by the weather. We never did get to swim, as the rain didn’t slow until we were eating dinner and about to get on the bus back to Ljublana. M and I were cold as we sat down to dinner, but we wrapped ourselves in towels, changed into what dry clothing items we had with us, drank lots of hot tea, and stoked the inner furnaces with a classic Slovenian dinner: soup (mushroom for me and Joy, pumpkin for M), venison goulash for M, who had never tried venison before (“Bambi,” Joy observed), struklji with porcini for me, and klobasa with a side of mashed potatoes with onions for Joy.

One other little gift of the downpour: back at the beginning of the adventure, as we trooped along the edge of the lake en route to the bike rental, dispirited, M let out a little cry: “Ducklings!”

We stopped to watch the three or four little fuzzballs around their mom (?–I tend to assume that brown ducks are female, though I know that that is not always the case). This is how we discovered that when it rains, mama ducks make their bodies into a shelter for their ducklings. I’m guessing that the little ones need help keeping warm, and maybe also that down doesn’t repel water as well as feathers, though I suppose the latter is not the case, because of course ducklings swim alongside their parents without getting saturated and weighed down. In any case, this is what they do. Within a few seconds, the fuzzballs had disappeared under her wings and you wouldn’t have known, walking past, that you were seeing anything other than an adult duck, slightly puffed-up perhaps, hunkered down and waiting out the rain on the bank of the lake. Once we knew to watch for it, we could spot other mama ducks whose wings had that pooched-out look that signaled the presence of ducklings beneath.

As for our first duck family, we stayed watching them for a while, and at one point the babies ventured out and looked around before ducking (heh) back under the tent of mom.

Between the ducklings, a swan we also saw, the unalterable peace of the setting, and the bike ride, it was a beautiful day at Lake Bled after all.