"Trip to Nature"

A Steep Climb

Monday, 1st April 2002, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

If you look at my schedule, you'll see that on March 30 2002 there was a scheduled "visit to the Slovenia countryside," or as the local devotees preferred to call it, "a trip to nature."

I thought, "Okay, we're going to go for a drive and they're going to show me some scenery. Maybe I'll see some Slovenia farms, some vineyards, some rivers, etc."

Actually, however, it was none of these.

After about a 45 minute drive into the more rural areas near Ljubljana, we came to a mountain with a big antenna on top. The devotees then informed me that we were "going to the top."

I thought, "Okay, we're going to walk up that after we find a parking spot near the top."

We parked at the bottom and then hiked up the mountain. All seventeen of us.

And it was pretty steep, as well. I not only surprised myself, but apparently I surprised the local devotees - I just cruised up the mountain without much difficulty despite the steep slopes. Of course, someone loaned me one of their ski poles, which really helped with my bad knees, but we all made pretty good time, and reached the top in less than an hour and a half.

"TRIP TO NATURE" movies I recommend you to use the RIGHT button on your mouse on each of these links below. When the menu pops up, select "SAVE AS" and then save the files to your hard disk. When viewing them, open Windows Media Player, select "FILE" and then "OPEN" - browse to where you saved the movies you just downloaded, and highlight ALL of them. Media Player will then play them as if they were all ONE movie. Movie 1 (2.06 MB) Movie 2 (3.80 MB) Movie 3 (3.83 MB) Movie 4 (2.13 MB) Movie 5 (2.21 MB) Movie 6 (3.54 MB) Movie 7 (1.79 MB) Movie 8 (1.75 MB) Movie 9 (3.80 MB) Movie 10 (3.82 MB) Movie 11 (3.09 MB) Movie 12 (3.09 MB) Movie 13 (3.82 MB) Movie 14 (3.81 MB) Movie 15 (3.80 MB)

The mountain was 1100 meters (3609 feet), and our starting point was about 300 meters (984 feet) above sea level, so the climb was a modest 600 vertical meters (2625 feet).

Toward the very end of the climb I started to feel problems with my knees and that slowed me down a little, but still, to climb such a mountain in about an hour and a half is not bad.

Someone took some movies of our climb up and down, and the kirtan we had at the bottom of the mountain. The movies are all "AVI" files, viewable in Microsoft Media Player, standard in most versions of Windows. You can download those files and watch them. I recommend you do this if you have a high-speed connection to the Internet. You can also do it if you have only dialup access, but it will take you awhile to download all of the files. (See inset at right)