Catching the Wrong Train in Slovenia

Trying to expedite my passage to the Slovenian War History Museum in Pivka, a little town in the southwest of the country, I spent the night in the Ljubljana train station. Knowing that trains to Pivka are few and far between, I was determined to catch the earliest train there--ruling out finding a room at 1:30 in the morning only to return for the 6:00 am train to Pivka (and two hours before I could exchange money for Euros.)

The first glitch was that I didn't take into consideration that it was a Saturday, and I didn't have the foresight to purchase a round-trip ticket. The Pivka train station office was closed, therefore I would have to buy my ticket (with Euros) on board the train, and there was no exchange office in the small farming community. Silly me!

The museum was the site of a former Yugoslavian Army barracks, and also located near some remnants of World War I fortifications and the Italian Alpine Wall, an interwar defense network constructed when the region was under Italian control.

A Yugoslav T-55 stands guard at the entrance to the Slovenian War History Museum.

The museum has many exhibits covering the evolution of weaponry, but what I was particularly interested in was the Slovenian war for independence in 1991, known as the "Ten-Day War" or the "Weekend War". (The main reason this war was resolved so quickly was due more to politics than military factors. Slovenia was the most ethnically homogeneous state within Yugoslavia, and had a very low number of  Serbians living there. The Yugoslav leadership was divided, but in the end they relinquished Slovenia because they anticipated the much more complex problem of  "protecting" the significant Serb population within the breakaway republic of Croatia.)

The turret of a Yugoslav tank destroyed by the Slovenian Home Defense. 

Little did I know that Yugoslavia had "need" at one time for  a submarine to patrol the Adriatic sea!

A portion of the Alpine Wall, constructed by Italy on the site of former World War I trenches. 

I was a little disappointed by the museum, as I didn't learn much more than I had already read or seen in part 3 of the BBC documentary, The Death of Yugoslavia. The best part of the visit was the gift shop, which serendipitously sold all sorts of military gear at relatively reasonable prices.

This helped to resolve glitch number two, as I had just hours earlier had a zipper blowout on the main storage area of my $2 garage sale acquired backpack!  And the gift shop accepted credit cards, score!

As I mentioned in the earlier, I didn't realize until I returned to the train station in Pivka (to catch the next to last train out of town) that the ticket office was closed. After walking two miles in the wrong direction, turning around, retracing my steps, and then a mere 500 yards in the right direction, I found an ATM. Luckily I still had time to sit down at a mom and pop restaurant for probably the best meal of my journey so far.

Now for glitch number three: the train I was taking back to Ljubljana was delayed unbeknownst to me, and I accidentally hopped on board the only train passing through at approximately the same time in this one-horse town. The conductor was very sympathetic of my error, and advised me how to correct my error: travel another half-hour in the wrong direction, so that I could link up with the next train back to Ljubljana.It made for quite a lengthy day, but the lumpy bed in the 9 bunk hostel room seem like heaven.