Day 228: North to Austria

Long day of travelling today! Packed up and left our apartment at 10am, and drove the hour or so back to Ljubljana. We were getting a train to Graz later today, so I dropped Shandos at the train station and left her with Schnitzel in a cafe with all our luggage.

Drove the 30 minutes or so out of town to the airport where I returned our car, after waiting an interminable 45 minutes in a queue. Car rental transactions always take so long, and it's beyond me why companies willingly staff their desks with just one person. Madness, though I guess they don't care that much.

After the wait, dropping the car itself off was fine, no problems. Got a shuttle bus back into Ljubljana town, though I had to wait ages for it to fill up before the driver wanted to leave. Felt like being back in Asia again!

Met up with Shandos around 1pm and grabbed some McDonalds for lunch since that was the more appealing fare than what was on offer at the train station. Now it was my turn to mind the luggage for a couple of hours while Shandos went shopping! All good, I've got loads of podcasts to listen to.

Finally around 3:45 we headed over to the platform and boarded our train for Graz. It left pretty promptly at 4pm and wound its way eastwards across Slovenia. Sometimes through interesting countryside, sometimes not. Quite a long journey, and we didn't arrive in Graz in Austria until about 7:20pm on a Sunday night. 3 hours 20 minutes is one of the longest train trips we've done, certainly on this holiday anyway!

Our hotel was only a few hundred metres from the station so we walked down and checked in - totally automatically as the front desk is unstaffed after 6pm. Room is nice though it feels a bit small after having a succession of apartments to ourselves. First hotel in quite a while, probably since Luxembourg I think!

Settled in and did a few things then headed out for dinner. Since it was a Sunday night and almost everything else was closed, we ended up having kebabs from a nearby store. It's surprising how ubiquitous kebab stores are in Europe - they really are everywhere! Though quite different from Australian kebabs, here if you order a doner kebab you'll get meat and salad in a round bread roll thing, if you want a wrap like in Australia you have to order durum kebap.

Oh well. Tasty enough, we both ate our fill and then headed up to bed, keen to explore the city tomorrow!Read more