Slovenia with kids

🚗 One car, ten days, none of it far apart

The case for Slovenia with children is a geography argument. Alps, gorge, river, cave and Adriatic coast all sit inside a country smaller than New Jersey, so the landscape changes completely every day without anyone spending a day getting there. The longest single drive we did on the whole loop was two and a half hours, and that was the one that took us from a mountain to the sea.

We drove it as a loop out of Ljubljana airport: north to Lake Bled first, west over the mountains into the Soča Valley, south to the coast at Piran, then back inland through Postojna and Ljubljana. Ten nights, four bases, one small white rental car.

You want the car. Slovenia's buses and trains will get you between the cities, but the good part of this trip is the bit between the cities — a donkey farm above Trenta, a swimming hole on the Soča, a gorge car park at nine in the morning before the coaches arrive. None of that runs to a timetable.

⛵ Lake Bled, done twice

Bled is where everyone starts and it deserves it: an island with a church on it sitting mid-lake, a castle on the cliff above, forested hills closing in behind. Our first morning was overcast with fog hanging in the slopes, which only made it look more like a storybook.

Do the lake two ways, on two different days if you can.

The pletna. The traditional flat-bottomed wooden boat with the striped canopy, rowed standing up by a licensed oarsman, out to the island and back. It is the postcard, and it is worth being in the postcard once. Our six-year-old sat up on the bench the whole way like he was captaining it.

The rowboat. On the sunnier day we rented one and rowed ourselves. This is the better one with kids — you stop where you like, you take as long as you like, and everyone gets a turn ruining the steering.

Then the thing no list had told us about: the lakeside swimming area with an inflatable water park, an Aquaglide course moored just offshore. Our kid in a life vest would have spent the entire week there and considered the mountains a distraction.

If you are traveling with someone who judges every destination by whether they can get wet, budget an afternoon for the inflatables and consider it money well spent.

🐐 Vintgar Gorge

Ten minutes' drive from Bled Castle and the whole character changes. Vintgar Gorge is a 1.6 km walk on wooden boardwalks bolted to the rock, a metre or two above water that is a genuinely improbable green, finishing at the Šum waterfall.

It is the easiest big-payoff walk of the trip: flat, short, and dramatic the entire way, which is a rare combination when you are trying to get a small person to walk anywhere.

Two things to know before you drive over:

• 🎟️ Book online, for a time slot. Vintgar caps how many people are inside at once and pushes hard for advance booking. Turning up on spec in August is how you get turned away.
• ↩️ The route is one-way. You walk the gorge in one direction and come back either on the marked trail over the top or on the shuttle from the exit — decide which before you start, because the walk back is longer than the walk through.

The under-advertised feature, for our purposes, was the animal enclosure near the entrance — goats in a rustic wooden pen. Our oldest appointed himself tour guide for the camera at the gate and then spent a solid stretch of the visit with the goats. Whatever gets them to the trailhead in a good mood.