InterWhits: Piran One

I am going to take this opportunity to say how much I loooove train travel and will be looking for opportunities to train in the future. Train stations are located much closer to city centers than airports so that expensive and time-consuming taxi rides can be avoided. Trains are also better connected to and integrated with existing public transit. There is no security to go through, or long check-in lines. So, there is no advantage to being more than 5 minutes early for the train. If fact, as we novices discovered early on, if one arrives too early, the platform for the train will not be posted and one has to kill time in the train station. As the four of us have traveled we have most often had four chairs facing a table so that we can order meals from the restaurant car and play a lot of cards. Sometimes we have had the entire train car to ourselves for a stretch. The ceiling height and aisle width are much greater than those of airplanes so that it is really possible to take a little stroll from one end of the train to the other when one is tired of sitting. The bathrooms are often large enough to twirl around with one's arms out. (Yeah, I tried it on the way to Ljubljana). Best of all, one can really enjoy the scenery and get a sense of the landscape changes from origin to destination.
Speaking of Landscapes--
The train ride from Vienna to Ljubljana, Slovenia and then on to Koper, Slovenia is gorgeous....wine orchard after wine orchard, church spires, castles on hills, rivers and waterfalls, over snowy mountains, more wine then half wine, half olive grove, still more churches and castles, the the jaggedy Karst, and finally the coast!
A quick geek-out on the Karst. Karst topography is that of soluble rock, especially limestone, that is prone to collapse and create caves, sink holes, underground rivers etc. In the States we have Mammoth Cave, Carlsbad etc.... However, the geo-geeky thing about the Karst region in Slovenia is that it is the Original Karst region--the only one with a capital 'K'--after which all of the other karst regions get the name 'karst'. In Slovenia, everyone (that I asked) knew the name of Janez Valvasor, a geographer from the 17th century who popularized the Karst among other things. So cool. The Slovenes claim that the Karst gives their thinly-sliced, dried ham (Prsut) a special flavour. It certainly has some amazing caves that I will discuss later.
First, Piran! Maya and I escaped gray and snowy Vienna for Piran a few days before the boys joined us-Girl's Week. We were so happy to be in the sunshine that we spent a lot of time just sitting or lying in the sun and going on long walks around the beautiful Peninsula.