Day 13: Šmartno Slovenia to Cormóns Italy

It was a moderate 4 hour hike through Italian & Slovenian wine country, so we turned it into a 6 hour wine crawl!

Day 11 on the Alpe Adria Trail

Šmartno was such a great stop for the night. The food was amazing (we later learned that our hotel restaurant serves the best food in the region). The Hotel Marica was charming.

Here’s a photo from 1978 (pre-restoration) and this morning. Restoration completed in 2012.

Today’s landscape was gorgeous. Some hikers have said they thought this part of the trail was boring, but we’re enjoying how everything changes as we progress along the trail day by day: language, architecture, decor, culture, food, and industry varies so much. An extended walk like this is a really interesting way to experience new places.

Love this color scheme! We’ve been seeing it everywhere the past two days. Fun fact: shutters were once painted with green arsenic to ward off termites, and now the tradition continues.

Today, little viticulture communities dot the terraced hillsides. And most settlements have a church with a bell tower… and usually a cell tower.

As we walked through the vineyards, a group of kids, maybe 4 or 5 years old, were playing under the watchful eyes of a few adults. One little girl ran up to us and sweetly said ‘dober dan’ (good morning in Slovenian). We replied, and soon all the kids were wishing us ‘dober dan.’ Such a heartwarming moment!

When we’re walking on roads, we have to be cautious of the tractors blasting down the road pulling trailers full of grapes.

We climbed to the town of Medana for our first wine sampling of the day.

This region produces more white wines than red, although we do see a lot of red grapes being harvested. The favored varietal is the Ribolla Gialla and it produces a lovely crisp white wine.

We left Medana and a few minutes later we found a boutique hotel and restaurant that was happy to pour us a glass of sparkling white and let us eat our trail lunch on the patio.

A pretty amazing place to snack on prosciutto and cheese!

And a few more steps down the trail we found another lovely place to sample a sparkling rosé produced by a family that’s been making wine in that very spot for over 100 years.

After 3 wine stops, we decided it was time to get serious about making our way to our B&B in Cormóns.

Our B&B is lovely! It’s a colorful, eclectic house built in the 1700’s and our hostess is very friendly (she and her dog Arnica welcomed us with glasses of wine).

Tomorrow, she’s cooking part of our breakfast in her traditional Italian kitchen.

We found our way to a pizzeria for dinner. I forgot to take photos, but I had an amazing aged cheese and potato pizza. Bob had a pizza with sliced hotdogs. He was very happy.

We’re anticipating rain tonight and early tomorrow. Tomorrow is a long day for us, so we’ll be getting out the rain gear!

Cio for now!