Larry and I went out for a drive one afternoon to see a country church built by a famous Slovene architect, Joże Pleĉnik. It is one of the most unique churches I have seen. Set in the middle of farmlands, literally on marshes, it is called St. Michael in the Marshes. Because of the ground conditions, Pleĉnik built the church on approximately 350 eight meter piles. It’s a simple but beautiful building. We happened to show up at the church on the day they were holding a town festival, celebrating their farming heritage with demonstrations of period techniques, farm animals, and plenty of local pivo (beer), of course. What great fun!

After visiting the church we took off down the road to explore some of the smaller towns in the area. It was a Saturday afternoon and we didn’t have anywhere to be so we took our time. After wandering for a while Larry noticed that one of the directional signs pointing to nearby towns was named something unique. I’ll let the video do the explaining:

Yep. Hell. Apparently it’s a ridge where there are several beautiful waterfalls and because the ridge was so impassable back in the day, the people named it “Hell”. We were getting late in the day and running out of light, and I was in flip-flops, but we decided to hike up to the first couple of falls which were easily accessible, and see what they were about. Unfortunately not a lot of water is running through them this time of year, but they were still pretty. And now we can say that we’ve been to Hell and back.