September 5, 1998
PDX to Slovenia
We awoke at 4, quickly assembled ourselves and our equipment, and cycled away from the Hampton Inn to the PDX airport terminal a half mile away. The air was warm, dry and refreshing. By 4:45 I was in the process of disassembling bikes while Rachael checked us in for our 6:30 flight to Slovenia.
The night before, our friends Laurie and Alan rode up with us to drop us off after a great Thai dinner at Typhoon. We drove our car, and Laurie, fresh from a refresher course with me on driving a manual transmission, planned to drive it back to our homes in Salem.
The flight was fairly uneventful, which was a relief - an unexplained crash of a jumbo jet had occurred yesterday, and we were a bit jumpy about flying. Our flight stopped over briefly in Seattle, for 2 hours in JFK, and 4 more hours in Vienna before finally ariving at 2:30PM the next day, in the pouring rain.
After a brief scare when it looked as though our bikes were AWOL, we arranged for a pick-up to a small pension two miles away, feeling deeply grateful to be spared a ride in the downpour. Our pension was a lovely place, in a very small village. After checking in and after a several hour nap, we set out on short hike at dusk to the neighboring village and back, enjoying what we were to discover was typical Slovenian countryside: closely spaced villages, each with its own lovely church at the center; houses similar in style to those we'd seen in Austria - cinder block, flower boxes, clean; and much small-scale agriculture. Seemingly every home has a well tended garden and fruit trees, and many of the yards have freely ranging chickens. In many lots, racks in the unique Slovenian style are draped with drying hay and ears of corn.
We returned to our inn as dark arrived, and enjoyed the supper of the day - salad, beef broth, and roast turkey breast. We were both exceedingly pleased at the outcome of our first day, after of our fears of either drowning in an aircraft disaster or arriving in Ljubljana exhausted.
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