Dear hiveans,
Hope you are doing well.
It has been a while, since my last post and at that time I announced that you can expect my next travel article in the following days/weeks.
So here I am, writing and hoping to bring my experience close to you and possibly inspire some of you to choose Slovenia as your future destination.
I decided to split my weekend getaway into two parts plus small bonus edition to finish it up. We were on this trip for two nights only and didn’t really have much time to explore around, but still we did visit two attractions there which are Arboretum Volčji Potok and Velika Planina. First one, I will present today and the second one will come in the following week probably.
I was there with my wife and kids of course, plus another couple with one toddler joined us on this weekend getaway. I must admit we had a great time together!
On Friday we decided to go to Arboretum Volčji Potok, which is located only 20 kilometres from Ljubljana and can be easily done as a daytrip or even half-day from there as well. Volčji Potok is known to be the most visited botanical garden in Slovenia! I can not remember if I ever visited it before, but I am quite positive that I did with some school trip or maybe even with my parents when I was a young boy. In any case, I viewed it now from a totally different perspective. I was impressed from the moment I entered. This thing is really huge and you can see that right when you get through the door and green field opens up. There you have several possibilities to start your tour and we went with “recommended way of visit” which is clearly marked in the park. Maybe I should write botanical garden instead of park, but the word park is closer to me. After about 5 minutes’ walk you come to big green dog which don’t bark at all :) It is a great attraction for kids and definitely not the last one…
There are also plenty of beautiful flowers around. I am not a botany specialist, so better to see them on the photos instead of me giving some false information about them. But one I know for sure, sunflower ;)
After a nice walk between the gardens you come to a small Coffee shop where they also serve ice-cream and waffles. Both looked delicious, but unfortunately I can not give personal feedback as I didn’t try any of it due to kids wanted to go to playground as soon as possible. And we really cane to the playground in about 20 minutes’ walk from the entrance. If you ask kids, we would still be there :) They really have nice playground and I was surprised in a very positive way as I didn’t really expect any special playground in there and get the best playground I ever visited! So many different slides, some of them build in trees. They are pretty much all good maintained as well. We spend about an hour there and would have hard time leaving if there were not a train which was even a better option in kids eyes than playground at current time. We jumped on it and went for a short ride. It was about 15 minutes ride which take you at the lower loop of the park. There is another loop, which is fairly bigger and it takes around half an hour to complete and there you do a whole park. We saved that ride for the next time and enjoyed on shorter one. It was a great experience for kids and for us parents a good way to take a rest for a few minutes :) This ride was also great possibility to take a first look at the exhibition going on in the park. It was time for some dinosaurs, kids always loves them! There were some whales and dolphins there as well, which is just right for this time of the year. I managed to take a few shots and some dinosaurs experts can clarify if they did a good job catching the size an all other details.
Train loop ended with bell ring at the playground and that was opportunity for little extra play time. We also went to the maze which was quite nice as it was made of cypresses and had a nice view tower at the end.
It was slowly getting late so we decided to depart to our resort where dinner waited on us, but more from that in a bonus post which is still to come.
To summarize, Volčji Potok is great place from flower lovers, I am sure about that, but we actually spend more time playing around so it is an amazing place for kids as well, meaning you will find me there much more often…
Below I am sending some photos as promised. They were all taken with my smartphone, but I promise I will go there once with my camera as well, to take some proper botany photos.
Enjoy your day ahead!
