Birthday Bust in Slovenia

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

Birthdays in the Jahns family are a big deal.  We always treat the birthday boy/girl/mom or dad to breakfast in bed - which is a tradition passed down from "Nana Bet" (Dan's mom).  There are always some presents - each sibling buys something with their own money that they pick out for the birthday boy or girl and there are always plenty pressies from the relatives. Then there may be a party with friends or at least a nice dinner out at a favorite restaurant. 

Well this year Austen turned 10 while we were doing a farm work/stay in a remote mountain village in Solvenia. That meant no breakfast in bed - all meals were provided by the farm host - AND Austen had to work on her birthday.  

But when work ended at 2pm we wanted to try and salvage some of her special day so we piled in the car to head to a shopping mall about an hour away - window shopping is Austen's passion.  On the way we stopped at a small village called Kanal to swim in the, well, canal.  It was a beautiful, and deep, trench of water that we enjoyed swimming in and jumping off the cliffs. 

But after we dried off and made our way to our rental car I thought it was curious that our rental Renault didn't open automatically when we got close as it always had previously.  So I searched in my bag to retrieve the key, but it was not there.  I checked my pants pockets and sent the kids on a mission to check down by the water, but no joy.  

Of course, at first you're feeling okay because you're in denial and you're confident the key will be found. But then, when you think that you definitely had it in your bag and it's no longer there, the realization starts to dawn on you that the key may be gone. Lost? Stolen? Fell in the water?  Who knows, but it doesn't really matter.  The dog gone key is gone. 

So then you move on to the panic stage.  Your mind starts reeling with questions like "What do we do next?", "Will the rental car company even have a spare key?", "Will they have to send a new car out to us?", "How much will they charge us for all that?".  Then you push down your panic and go into survival mode.  

Okay, next step is to call the rental car company.  Turns out that is easier said then done because the eSIM card you have doesn't want to play nice and let you make a call.  So you get resourceful and ask the friendly server at the cafe where you have set up your triage center to borrow his phone which he is more than happy to do.  Amazingly you reach a live person on the first try and even more suprisingly they act like this kind of thing happens all the time which makes you feel a little better.  But when you ask them if someone can come out today, like NOW, to salvage your daughter's birthday, or how much this will cost us, they aren't so sure. That's another department. 

At least you're able to connect with them via WhatsApp so you no longer need the friendly server's phone and you wait patiently to hear back from the local branch office. When you do the prognosis is not good. At least not as good as you were hoping for.  They aren't sure if they have a spare key for our car and in any case they would not be able to come out with the key or another car tonight, it would have to be first thing in the morning.  So we arrange to have someone from Sixt Rental car drive the 2 hours from Ljublijana to the farm first thing in the morning either with a spare set of keys or another rental car - we wouldn't know which until they showed up.  Of course we would still have to go back to Kanal to get our stuff from the car including Austen's birthday presents that were in the trunk.

Okay so at least the logistics part was settled, even if it was not what we had hoped for.  But now, at 5:30pm we were faced with another obstacle: how to get from Kanal to Nova Granica where the mall was to make our 7pm reservation at a steak house - Austen's favorite - near the mall.  Nova Granica was 30 minutes away and there is no Uber in this part of Slovenia.  I called a couple of taxi companies, but they either didn't answer or they could not make it to where we were for another hour.  

So Francesca - ever the travel agent guru - researched and found that we could take a local train from Kanal to Granica and the next one was coming in 10 mins.  So we paid our cafe bill, thanked the kindly server, and hustled off to the train station.  Fortunately the train was late as we were cutting it close, but unfortunatetly it was so late that we had to miss our steak house reservation.  We told Austen that we would only have time for either the steak restaurant or the mall and she chose the mall.

After taking a taxi from the station to the mall - one we arranged by phone in Kanal - Austen was like a pig in s#@t wandering around a suprisingly western style mall - surprising given the surpremely rural area we were in only moments before.

She was able to select a few birthday gifts with money from relatives and do a bunch of window shopping, her favorite pastime, and the piece de resistance, was dinner at McDonald's which is her close second favorite after  a steak restaurant. 

After all that happened, we salvaged a pretty decent birthday for Austen, even if it was not a typical Jahns celebration.  But we keep coming back to our trip motto - "Roll With It!"  And that is exactly what Austen and her siblings did.  And Francesca and I are proud of them for it.