Maribor is the second largest city in Slovenia. If one is headed from Zagreb to Vienna as we were, you pass through Maribor. We decided to spend one night there and see the place. It turns out that we had the most enjoyable evening of our entire vacation that night. We had booked a three-hour food and wine tour, where you stop at various places for small bites, wine tastings, a large meal, then dessert. Just like our walking tour in Zagreb, we were the only two people on our tour. Our guide, Luka, was an absolute delight. We enjoyed his company and hearing about life in Slovenia. His day job is a brewmaster at a local craft beer brewery. He normally handles the beer tours, but he was covering for the food and wine tour person who was not available that night. That was our good fortune. When Luka is not brewing and conducting tours, he is a guitar player in a local band. And as a bonus, when it started raining as we were walking between our stops (the only time it rained on us the entire two weeks), we ducked into a wonderful little craft beer bar where he is good friends with the owner, who is orignally from Montana. We had a wonderful local beer, shots and enjoyed the atmosphere of this unscheduled stop. The wine tasting before the beer stop was at the Old Vine House, where the oldest known producing wine vine in the world (450 years old I think). The wines were amazing. But only something like 2% of the wine that is produced in Slovenia leaves the country. They drink it all themselves! The dinner we had after the beer stop was delicious. Our hotel was the least expensive hotel we had on our trip. They had shut down the AC for the season, and our room was a bit warm. We ended up alternating between having the window open and hearing the traffic from the 4-lane road next to our hotel, and then closing the window until it got too warm. Not our best night’s sleep, but it was only one night.
Our hotel was a 15-minute walk to the train station; however, we did not want to walk that far with our luggage. Uber does not operate in Maribor. Tom tried to use the local taxi app, but it came back that no cars were available. We went into the tourist info shop next door to our hotel and they called a taxi. The taxi ride with tip was only 5 euros. Our train travel that day was from Maribor to Graz, Austria, where we were to change trains to Vienna. Our train leaving Maribor was late, so we missed our connection in Graz. But it was as simple as stopping in at the OBB Customer Information desk in Graz, where they rebooked us on the next train that was leaving 30 minutes later.
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