Day: June 12, 2014

We travelled to Croatia for to visit the Plitvice lakes or Plitvicka Jezera National Park – but the first day was grey and overcast, so we first had coffee and bought some of the famous local cheese at the Turk Sira then visited the Barac caves in the morning.

A big river source right next to the caves


At the entrance to the upper barac cave with Vera, our guide




Entrance to one of the other caves

We then had a highly mediocre lunch of canned vegetables, over grilled calamari and tasteless cheese.

Mostly by chance we got there (almost) in time for the daily flight demonstrations go the beautiful birds of prey, living at the Riegersburg.
Raven


Turkey vulture

Snow owl “Hedwig”

Leilani got to hold a Bateleur Eagle afterwards.

I an home, and worked on a lot of photos on the plane and now I can’t sleep, so I am posting them:

Oma, Leilani and I walked up to the Riegersburg Castle. It was a beautiful day, and the views were spectacular.

While I explored Leilani found this slide. She called it scandalous, it was very fast, and the landing not padded. That did not keep her from doing it again though…


The town of Riegersburg below

Leilani likes to pretend to be a statue





The Turks tried multiple times to take the castle but failed, one time they got so mad that they “engraved a huge half-moon (their symbol) at the bottom of the rock”. I can only imagine the knights laughing at that, but they did make a fake turk and put him up on the castle’s outer wall, don’t know if one of these is the one.








At the foot of it there is a bee learning center, beekeeping through the centuries and feeding plants get explained. I want to go back when it is open.

And a reason for Andy to go there! Leopold Klettersteig looks like a lot of fun.