Ribcev Laz - the apartment incident

In true Griswald European Vacation style we are staying in the wrong apartment.

To get to our apartment we followed the instructions provided by the lady on the email.  The instructions said we had to drive about 700m past the town sign, look for a tourist agency and then the apartment would be 50m from that with "APARTMAJI" written on the building.  Because she was away the keys would be in the door.  She also left her phone number.  How could you go wrong?

Our apartment - sort of

After a 90 minute drive from Predjama Castle we arrived at Ribcev Lav in the dark, in a small village, at about 6pm.  I didn't have a Slovenian sim card as yet so a call was out of the question.  Everything in the town was closed.  

Nevermind.
  
700m past sign - tick
Tourist office - tick
Apartment with 'Apartmaji' on it - tick.

This is it I declared but to make sure, and you should make sure, I knocked on the door.  Out came a lady and I asked if this was our apartment.  She looked at me a bit funny and I explained that the lady I'd organised it through was away.  'Oh' she said 'my daughter is in America at the moment you must have been speaking to her'.

So we got shown upstairs to our rooms and there, as promised, were keys in the door - tick. 

Perfect.  

WRONG!!!!

The next day the lady, who was still away, sent us an email to ask if we'd found the apartment.  I wrote that we were there and Nada and Grega were looking after us and that everything was fine, thanks very much.

The next day she returned back to the village and checked the apartment to find we weren't there.  That's when the proverbial hit the fan.  

We received quite an irate email from her accusing us of dishonesty, shopping around for a cheaper apartment and not caring about the people we were dealing with.

A quick reread of the original email (what the bloody hell happened) said that the apartment was on the left hand side of the road and not the right where we were.  

Anyway I wrote a very apologetic email explaining what had happened and how we were very sorry.

She didn't believe a word of it and I received another rather lengthy diatribe with a demand for a no-show fee.  She'd had her mother turn the heating on (which was running for 3 days while we weren't there) and said no to the people who wanted to extend their stay in the apartment so I could see her point.  

Our apartment - if we'd read the
instructions correctly.

We sat on that email for a while and decided to go out for a walk in the forest and what did we see, clear as a bell, but her apartment not 50m from where we were staying.  

Bloody hell, how'd we miss that?  

To top it off we knew she was back in town now (there's only about 100 people in this village at the moment and she had spoken to our hosts as they were neighbours) so we were paranoid that at any moment we'd be confronted by an angry Slovenian lady demanding restitution.

For the next few days we spent a lot of the time in village walking quickly from place to place, looking at the ground and trying to avoid eye contact with any of the locals.  We're pretty sure that she spotted us just outside the supermarket as we got the stare of death from a particularly hostile lady.  

If looks could kill and all that.

Stray observations:  Read and reread your instructions.  And then read them again.