Yesterday we spent the day in Pura since I had to work in the morning and we wanted to try to get a pet passport for Summer (see below). Luckily the weather was absolutely beautiful so Melisa wasn't bored while I worked, and in the evening we went for a nice dinner at our favourite restaurant on Lake Lugano, where I had a special pizza, a 'Pinsa Romana', and Melisa had one of her favourites, Vitello Tonato (veal covered in a creamy tuna sauce).

As for today, we had our longest driving day for a while as we looked to get past Italy and onwards to places we haven't visited previously in the Balkans. The drive from Milan to the Slovenian border is one we have done before, and isn't particularly noteworthy other than admiring how wonderfully straight Italian motorways can be in places. Once into Slovenia we had to buy a toll sticker 'vignette' at the border, which cost €15 for 1 week for a standard car; again, something we have done before, though they don't give you a sticker nowadays, just a receipt as they enter your licence plate in the system. It left me wondering why Switzerland doesn't move away from the sticker system, which is easy to abuse as many simply don't get caught, and into something more automated using ANPR like they've done here in Slovenia.

The drive from the Italy/Slovenia border was the driving highlight of the day, with a very pleasant motorway past some lovely forested and low-mountainous landscape dotted with quaint villages in a style similar to what we have seen before in Czechia and Croatia. We didn't have time to visit Ljubljana this evening unfortunately, as we are staying at a guest house a few kilometres outside the city centre. Instead, we cooked in the apartment and rested up ready to go to the city centre tomorrow morning first thing.

I should mention how friendly we have found all the Slovenians so far in our short time here. From the lovely people running our apartment, to the perfect English spoken in the local supermarket, and to a man on a motorbike who could see I was a foreign driver and gave me a tip about where to go at some temporary traffic lights.

And the biggest mystery of the day? How to pronounce Ljubljana! We asked the very friendly host at our apartment for the night, and we can comfortably say it properly out loud now, but I'm struggling to think of a good way to write it down phonetically...