Domen from 3glav Adventures – Bled Stories podcast Bled Stories

Adventure is just a moment away every day of the week
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Address: Ljubljanska cesta 1, 4260 Bled, Slovenia
Phone: +386 41 683 184
Web: www.3glav.com/

Walk up the hill from Bled’s town centre on the main road. You are heading towards the Post Office and the public library. You will pass the Okarina restaurant where Paul McCartney once had dinner – vegetarian of course. Okarina is noted for its vegetarian cuisine. Right opposite there is an old green wooden building. Outside there’s a basket which at another time would have been tethered to a balloon floating above the lake and the castle. There are bicycles for hire. The little green building is filled with the stuff of adventures. It attracts your attention because it looks a little out of place, perhaps a little out of time. It belongs here, but did it come from somewhere else? There is nothing like it in Bled.

Here you will meet Domen Kalajžič – Founder of 3glav Adventures who runs 3glav Adventures. His family have owned the little building for over 100 years. As you will hear, it's not from Bled but was moved here by Domen's grandfather.

A history of the humble Green Shop
A hundred years ago it was a tailor’s shop belonging to the King’s tailor. The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was founded in 1918 and the royal family had a summer palace where Vila Bled is situated. The little green shack is the place where the tailor’s great grandson Domen Kalajžič runs 3glav Adventures.
3glav (or Triglav) is named after the highest mountain in Slovenia. You can see its peaks from Bled if you look to the west.

“It was at the old Bled Lesce train station before the first world war.” Domen tells me. “My great-grandfather bought the ticket office when they built the proper brick train station in Lesce. He bought the hut and somehow transported it to Bled and put it where 3glav Adventures office now is. The building where it stands now protected. It is more than 200 years old and has been in Domen’s family for 100 years.”

The humble green wooden structure is as much part of Bled’s history as any palace. It was passed from generation to generation. “Four or five generations now. Usually the same business passes from one generation to another, but this little green hut has served our family for totally different types of businesses in each generation.” First a tailor’s, then Domen’s mother ran a herbal pharmacy. Now an adventure business.

Domen and his family
Domen is the first generation of adventurers. Three years after Slovenia became an independent nation in 1991, Domen began travelling. It was a gap year between high school and university. “It was the new age of back packing – the pioneering years. Economically it was pretty hard. Air tickets were a lot more expensive. I had travelled before, but this was my first serious trip.”

Aged 18, free for four or five months, Domen first headed south to Australia and New Zealand. It was the beginning of a way of life. Every year since then he has spent four or five months travelling.

That’s where he got the travel bug, but the idea for running a tourist adventure business had not even begun to form in his mind. Domen’s focus was still on travel. When he graduated from university in 1999 with a degree in Information Technology & Management, the world was his to explore and he spent a whole year discovering it.
Yet, there were no thoughts about starting a tourism business. He settled in America for three years, "I was in California from 2000 to 2003 running a small computer company named Brainworks. Of course, in my free time I was exploring Santa Monica mountains and other outdoor areas every weekend by mountain bike or hiking.

"I know North America pretty well and I keep returning every year since 1996 doing local road trips and hiking in the less known regions. The great outdoors there are magnificent, on contrary of what ou