Hunting For Snowdrops

Common snowdrop is one of the earliest wildflowers that announces spring here. It can be found near water in damp woodland edges and also in meadows, sometimes even in winter.
Last Sunday my wife and I went for a walk to see if anything had peeped out of the ground.

There is no snow, or what little there was has melted, the days are sunny and getting longer, the temperature is slowly rising.

We went to see where we used to go with our children when they were little (now our sons go their own way 😁), to the village of Mereče, next to the Podstenjšek stream, which flows into the Reka river. If it rains, it can flood the valley quite well ...

I parked the car next to the road, here it is also possible to ford a stream and go hunting for snowdrops.

The Podstenjšek stream looks small and modest. But looks are deceiving. When there is a storm with a bit more rain, the water that flows from under the hills rises over one meter.

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Well, where are the snowdrops? Our Atos is also looking around ... He's probably sniffing something else, not snowdrops :)

Look, Atos, they are all around you. 😁

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A field of snowdrops!
They were in the grass, in the orchard, in the bushes, at the edge of the forest, everywhere.

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Well, I've had enough of snowdrops, we've picked two bunches and now we're going down the road to the village of Mereče.

There is one interesting thing, this stream, Podstenjšek, above the village, almost as soon as it emerges from the cliffs, it makes small, stepped waterfalls, which are said to be worth seeing.

We keep going and again come to a stream that runs under the road. Next to it, as in almost every Slovenian village, is the Way of the Cross.

At this point, where it flows under the road, the stream has created stepped waterfalls.

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And an animation made from the video.

The stream actually originates below these cliffs, at the village of Podtabor. The name of the stream - 'Podstenjšek' translated into English mean something like 'Undercliffs'...

Well, let's move on to the village of Podtabor, there's something to see there too.

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We continue along an old military dirt road to a tunnel dug by the Italians in the 1930s.

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Here is a view of the Brkini hills in the background, below is Lake Mola, where my wife and I were about two weeks ago.

Well, here we are at the tunnel.

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What's on the other side? Nothing special 😁, a dirt road to the next village. The road is not used, only by some farmers to prepare firewood from the forest.