Birthday Bust in Slovenia

What do you do when you lose your rental car key in a tiny Slovenian village, in the middle of nowhere, on your daughter's 10th birthday? First, you panic… then you roll with it. 

Birthdays are a big deal in the Jahns family. Every year, the birthday boy, girl, mom, or dad gets breakfast in bed—a tradition passed down from Nana Bet (Dan’s mom). There are always presents, with each sibling picking out a gift using their own money, and plenty of packages arrive from relatives. Sometimes there’s a party with friends, or at least a special dinner at a favorite restaurant.

But this year was different. Austen turned 10 during a farm work-stay in a remote mountain village in Slovenia. That meant no breakfast in bed (all meals were provided by the farm host), and she still had to work on her birthday.

When work wrapped up at 2 p.m., we decided to salvage what was left of her special day. Austen loves window shopping, so we piled into the car and set out for a shopping mall about an hour away. On the way, we stopped in a small village called Kanal to swim in the...well...canal. The water was beautiful: a deep, crystal-clear trench perfect for swimming and cliff-jumping. 

After drying off, we made our way back to the car. That’s when things started to go wrong. The car didn’t unlock automatically as it always had. Odd, I thought. I reached into my bag for the key… but it wasn’t there. A quick search of my pockets revealed nothing, and the kids went on a mission to check by the water. Still nothing.

At first, I stayed optimistic, certain the key would turn up. But as the minutes ticked by, the sinking feeling set in. It was gone. Lost. Maybe it fell into the canal, or maybe it was stolen, but the why didn’t matter. What mattered was that the key was gone, and we were stranded.

Panic set in. My mind spiraled: What do we do next? Will the rental car company even have a spare key? Will they have to send a new car? How much will this cost? I pushed the panic down and shifted into survival mode.

First step: Call the rental car company. Easier said than done, since my eSIM card wasn’t cooperating. Resourcefulness kicked in. I asked the friendly server at the café where we’d set up our makeshift triage center if I could borrow his phone. He happily obliged.

Miraculously, I reached a live person on the first try. Even more miraculously, they didn’t seem fazed. Apparently, this sort of thing happens all the time, which gave me some comfort. Unfortunately, the answers I needed—like whether someone could come today or how much this would cost—weren’t in their department.

At least I was able to switch to WhatsApp to communicate with the local branch office. After some back-and-forth, the prognosis wasn’t great. They weren’t sure if they had a spare key for the car. Either way, they couldn’t come until the next morning. We arranged for someone from Sixt Rental Car to drive two hours from Ljubljana to the farm, either with a spare key or a replacement car. Meanwhile, we’d still have to return to Kanal the next day to retrieve our things from the car—including Austen’s birthday presents, which, sadly, were in the trunk.

With the logistics settled—sort of—it was time to tackle the next challenge: how to get from Kanal to Nova Gorica, where we had a 7 p.m. reservation at a steakhouse, Austen’s favorite. Nova Gorica was 30 minutes away, but there’s no Uber in this part of Slovenia.

I called a few taxi companies, but either they didn’t answer, or they couldn’t make it to us for at least an hour. Enter Francesca, the travel agent extraordinaire. She discovered we could take a local train from Kanal to Nova Gorica, and the next one was arriving in 10 minutes. We quickly paid our café bill, thanked the kind server, and hustled to the station.

The train was late, which was fortunate because we’d been cutting it close. Unfortunately, it was so late that we missed our steakhouse reservation. We gave Austen a choice: steak dinner or shopping at the mall. She chose the mall.

After taking a taxi from the station to the mall—one we’d arranged by phone back in Kanal—Austen was in her element. She was like a pig in poop, wandering through a surprisingly Western-style shopping mall. It was quite a contrast to the supremely rural area we’d been in just an hour earlier. 

She picked out a few birthday gifts using money from relatives, did some window shopping (her favorite pastime), and, as the pièce de résistance, we had dinner at McDonald’s. It’s her second-favorite option after a steakhouse, so she was thrilled. 

In the end, we managed to salvage a pretty decent birthday for Austen. It wasn’t a typical Jahns celebration, but we live by our trip motto: Roll with it!  And that’s exactly what Austen—and her siblings—did. Francesca and I couldn’t be prouder.