925 - The Water Song

As I said in the last post, I am in Carinthia for a week. No traveling, no “real” vacations, just relaxing. It’s Sunday evening by now. It did take me some time to digest yesterday’s short trip to Slovenia.

But before we get to Slovenia’s beautiful landscape, let’s first push one thing out of our way: So far we had no dandelion shot this year, the dandelion season is short, here is this year’s attempt 🙂

This is the meadow in front of our house in Villach. We’ll get back to that in a week or two, when it will be a sea of white, feathery balls.

Yesterday we left Villach relatively late, at 4pm, but on the highway and through a long tunnel of more than 6km, the trip to Slovenia takes no more than 15 minutes.

Our target was the nearest town, Jesenice, a particularly ugly town that formerly was a center of Austrian k&k weapon industry. I guess it stayed on that track through Slovenia’s time in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, then the Socialist People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, but at the time of Slovenia’s independence, the high days of heavy industry were past. Today Jesenice is a town that visibly struggles to keep with the pace of the rest of the country.

The idea was, to leave the highway at Hrušica, drive all the way through Jesenice, then at Slovenski Javornik to take a small road left and up the mountains, all the way up to Javorniški Rovt, and then to take an even smaller road high up, to the west, to Planina pod Golico, and from there down to Jesenice. Google Maps does not show this connecting road, our street map does, but we finally found out that although the road seems to exist, it is to be used “at one’s own risk”, and that is not to be taken lightly in Slovenia, as we had to find out in March.

Even the road up to that intimidating sign had been extremely steep and narrow, thus we decided to let it be. The images so far were all made on the way up or on the highest point, just before we turned around. Pretty nice panorama, huh?

The only problem is, that winter is long and hard there, and that even the nearest town is half an hour of steep mountain roads away, and even then, it’s not a beautiful modern city, it’s shabby, old Jesenice 🙂

Well, that’s not fair. Sure, this is not a marvel of modern architecture (or any architecture), but it is a place where people live, a place that enabled people to live decent lives, so, sorry, I shouldn’t make jokes about it.

Apart from its remains of heavy industry, the area is surprisingly rural and in fact very beautiful. This idyllic spring scene was shot somewhere between Koroška Bela and Moste, while we drove down to the small town of Radovljica.

We ended up with only a short look on that walled old town, deciding that it deserves more than a fleeting look. We’ll be back to it maybe this week if weather permits, but in any case soon.

The last image is across the plain from Radovljica north. I pretty liked the clouds and the light.

All of these image were shot with three lenses: the Nikon 70-300 VR, the Nikon DX 35/1.8, and finally the wide angles with the Nikon DX 10.5/2.8 fisheye, the latter post-processed with the “Fisheye-Hemi™” plugin.

Well, I don’t really know what I thought, when I packed a bag of primes for this week, even omitting the 24/2.8, leaving the 35/1.8 the widest lens apart from the fish, but at least the fish does a very decent job.

The Song of the Day, “The Water Song”, is from the 1968 Incredible String Band album “The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter”. This was the first ISB album that I ever bought, then on vinyl, and since then I have acquired about all of their albums. Still, “The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter” will always be something special.

For a long time, ISB songs were not to be found on YouTube, but recently even this album has become available. Hear “The Water Song” on YouTube.