The first leg of our journey was Pohorje, a region of mountains east of Maribor.

After a hearty breakfast and perhaps our last cappuccino in a long time, we took a 15 minute taxi from Maribor to the trailhead and took this fierce photo!

Day 1 was rather frustrating. There are a bunch of other trails that start in Maribor and all their markings are fairly spread apart, so we did a lot of going down the wrong trail and backtracking.

On one of our earlier detours we asked some farmers for directions. While they didn’t speak any English, they managed to get across that there were beehives in the direction we were walking towards and that we were most definitely not going the right way. Awkwardly, we ran into these guys two more times that day, each time looking more lost and helpless than the time before. You could tell they were extremely concerned about our prospects of finding the trail, much less completing it.

Things were feeling pretty hopeless when we met a guy who gave us some super helpful advice: follow the white and red dots with a 1 next to them. Foolishly, I had thought every white and red dot was a marker for the Slovenian Mountain Trail, but it turns out that those markers were for any mountain trail (of which Slovenia has many).

With our newfound wisdom, we set out again and found the trail only for our next disaster to strike: Nick getting sick (the rhyme makes this sound a lot more fun than it actually was).

Luckily, the Pohorje Mountains are also a super popular destination for skiing. It was a pretty grueling couple of hours, as hiking sick with a heavy pack that you’re not even used to yet sounds like a total nightmare. We eventually made it to a ski resort that caters to bikers in the summer.

While Nick focused on rest and recovery, I turned to the bar for solace and discovered what would become my cocktail of choice for the trip, a Hugo spritz. It seemed to be on every menu in Croatia and Slovenia. The drink is made with Prosecco, Elderflower, Seltzer, and when done well, lots of lemon slices and mint :)

Thankfully, Nick was up and running in no time! And thank god! The challenging part of our otherwise very lovely biker turned ski resort was that they seemed to only have one playlist and that playlist was a cover of eight American pop songs. These songs include Ava Max’s “Sweet but a Psycho, the Kid Laroi’s “Without You”, and “Stay” by Justin Beiber. These songs were mostly bops, don’t get me wrong, but after 3 days of listening to them on the loudspeaker from breakfast to dinner I was starting to lose it a bit.

The next day, we got back on the trail to finish stage 1. For some context, we are using a Slovenian Alpine Association (the association who manages the trail) guidebook to plan our journey. The trail can be conquered lots of ways, but officially has 43 stages and 80 checkpoints. Our guidebook splits the 43 stages into 37 days, combining a couple of the shorter stages into one day.

With health on our side, we blazed through the trail and sort of laughed at how long it took us to hike 2 miles a few days earlier. We made it to our first mountain hut by noon and celebrated with some Laskos and Unions (the two main beer companies in Slovenia) along with some French fries! Lunch also sparked the first major debate of the trip: Lasko vs. Union. I’m team Lasko, Nick is team Union. Both our owned by Heineken, but that’s not important. If you’ve never tried either, all you need to know is Lasko is objectively better and you should be team Lasko too. This is my completely unbiased opinion.

We also made our first friend of the trip! Živa, a girl who we’d coincidentally asked to take our picture in Maribor before we attempted stage 1 the first time. We had lunch with her and learned that she was also hiking the trails since she had just graduated and wanted to take some time before starting work. Živa helped us navigate our first hut menu and taught us to say cheers in Slovenian: na zdravje!

The first few stages cover a lot of distance but aren’t too challenging. There are some steep and windy sections, but much of the trail crosses pastures, ski resorts, dirt roads, and forested sections.

The end of the second stage was cool because we came above tree line into our first beautiful views of the trip! I also liked the design of the 3rd mountain hut, as it had a modern, concrete feel to it that made it distinctive from many of the other wood cabin style huts we’d stayed in.

Until this point, the huts had been pretty much empty, where in some cases, we had been the only guests. Unfortunately, the pitfall of hut no. 3 was our roommates. They too were a couple hiking the Slovenian Mountain trail, and things started off super cordial! But when sleep time came around, we soon realized they were the noisiest sleepers in Slovenia, perhaps the whole planet.

I could have dealt with the chorus of snores and wet farts that lasted the entire night. I could handle the sporadic sleep talking exchanges. What really set me over the edge was the bird call alarm that seemingly went off every 30 minutes throughout the night. At first, I thought it was a sound machine to counter all the other noises that were happening, but when I realized it was an alarm I just lost it. At 3:00 AM, I couldn’t take it anymore and while I should have said this hours ago, I asked them (not as politely as I maybe should have) to if please turn the bird noises the off, which in their defense, they eventually did. At 3:30 AM, however, we were met with piano noises instead, and I then knew we’d need to take our first intentional detour of the trip: to town for earplugs.

Ruška Kocǎ, our first mountain hut. Most of the huts have a larger outdoor seating area / beer garden to serve day hikers and bikers during the day, and a smaller dining room for guests later in the evening or early in the morning at breakfast.