Bud the Spud

Bet you've never been to a potato festival before. I've certainly never been to one, let alone in the Balkans. So when Susanna, the proprietor of our amazing hotel in the Slovenian Alps, told us about a potato festival happening in the nearby town of Crna na Koroskem (yes, I know, it's a beautiful name for a town, isn't it?), we jumped at the chance.

Ride our bikes in the Alps and go to a potato festival? You have to carpe the diem when opportunities like this arrive.

It's still one more day until we start the official 'guided' portion of the tour, so Doug and I decided to do some exploring of our own. Just below the hotel (which sits on a ridge high up in the Alps, with Austria across the valley) an overgrown donkey track veers off into the woods. We saw it last night while riding back to the hotel, so we'd vowed to check it out today.

It turned out to be an almost-perfect piece of singletrack snaking through the woods. It looked to be brand-new, and a fair bit of work had gone into it. I suspect Dixi, our guide, had cut this piece of trail. It ended in a 8-foot deep and 6-foot wide ditch that made one feel like they were doing a luge course on a mountain bike. The trail spit us out onto the highway - a perfect start to the day!

The ride to Crna Na Koroskem took us through some spectacular scenery. Slovenia is green - way greener than I expected - and streams and rivers abound. You can't go more than 1 km before another stream or waterfall passes by. And the mountains are incredible - big, rocky and postcard-worthy.

We ended up in Crna and followed the signs pointing us to the festival. We'd both expected a small low-key affair, maybe 30 or 40 Slovenes gathered around a few potatoes in a fire, with an accordion, a donkey and a bottle of plum brandy, Borat-style (hey, I'm Croatian - allow me 1 Borat joke about my people).

What we found instead was a massive festival. The first sign that this wasn't a low-key affair was the parking lot - hundreds, perhaps thousands of cars parked in an open field. We biked past the gates and entered the festival grounds, where dozens of stalls advertised potatoe dishes. We went to one stall and were instantly greeted with a shot of blueberry brandy, followed by a plate of boiled potatoes. More brandy (pear this time) followed. Fearing a drunken, potato-filled uphill ride back to our hotel, we extricated ourselves from the booth.

We visited a few more booths, each one offering potato dishes, for free no less. You would think at a potato festival you could get several styles of potato dishes: baked, mashed, fried, etc... Not at this potato festival. Every booth featured some slight variation of 'boiled potato with various random bits of meat.' Nevertheless, extremely yummy, especially after a 25-km ride.

There were accordions everywhere, a marching band, some sort of strange theatre involving wooden staffs, a giant beer tent, and the requisite 'drunken people singing folk songs with their arms around each other.' It reminded of the summers of my youth spent on the Croatian seaside. Doug was suitably amused by this display of traditional Balkan culture, and after some cevapcici (Croatian spice meat sandwiches) we decided to hit the road before the brandy hit us again.

We arrived at the hotel 2 hours later after a grueling uphill climb, spent and satiated, collapsing in the late afternoon sun in the sublime Slovenian Alps.