01
Stop one
Cankar Memorial House
Wilson Blade 25 V10 Junior Tennis Racquet: I knew Ivan when he was knee-high and already unbearable. Born right here on Klanec hill in 1876, the son of a poor tailor — and I do mean poor. You are looking at the rebuild, by the way: the original wooden cottage with the thatch roof burned in 1879, and they put this one up in 1880, which is the form it has kept ever since. Between us, the thatch looked better. Living room, sleeping chamber, black kitchen — that is the entire world of a family right on the edge of poverty at the close of the nineteenth century, and Ivan took that world and turned it into the most piercing fiction and drama anyone has written in Slovene. The greatest writer of Slovene prose. I told him so at the time; he never listened to a word I said. Vrhnika turns up in his work again and again, beloved and tormenting in the same sentence. It is a museum now, and literary pilgrims come from all over Slovenia. He would have hated the queue. He would have loved the queue. Both, all day, out loud.
04
Stop four
Church of the Holy Trinity
Wilson Blade 25 V10 Junior Tennis Racquet: I have made this climb more times than I can count, and it has been worth it since the seventeenth century. Built as a pilgrimage church in the baroque era, it replaced the older devotional stations up on the height, and once the processions began coming up from the parish below, the hill quietly took the church's own name — Sveta Trojica. That is how a hill gets renamed: by everybody's feet. Modest nave, bell tower, wooded ridge behind it — that silhouette is the emblem of Vrhnika, visible right out across the marsh plain, and the painters have never once left it alone. Ivan put the church on the hill among the images of home that haunted his prose, and I remember him looking up at it and saying nothing for rather a long time. The townspeople still walk up here daily, and it is the best viewpoint over the Ljubljana Marshes there is. Fewer roofs then. Same view.
One rule at my gate and it never changes: you have to be the right size for the ride. Not because I enjoy disappointing children — because a seat that does not fit is not fun, it is frightening, and they never come back.
The Wilson Blade 25 V10 Junior is a 25-inch frame, and 25 inches is a size, not a model number. Junior racquets are chosen by length against the player's height, and the 25-inch step usually suits a child of roughly eight to ten. It is light, it comes pre-strung and ready to play, and it has a junior grip made for smaller hands.
What it is really for is letting a young player swing properly — full, loose, from the shoulder — because a child holding an adult 27-inch frame simply shortens up and learns a cramped stroke that takes years to unlearn.
The fit test takes ten seconds: standing upright, racquet held down at their side, the butt cap should reach around hip height and the head should hang clear of the ground. Too long and it is the wrong ride.
Vrhnika is a small town that produced a very large writer, and it has never got over it. The Cankar Memorial House on Klanec hill preserves the birthplace of Ivan Cankar, the greatest writer of Slovene prose, born here in 1876 to a poor tailor; the original thatched cottage burned in 1879.
On Cankar Square stands his monument, a full-figure bronze in an unusually intimate pose — sitting, legs crossed, lost in thought, as though watching the town go by.
Beneath the modern town lie the remains of Nauportus, one of the oldest recorded settlements in Slovenia, whose name means ship-port: the place where cargo crossing from Aquileia was transferred to flat-bottomed boats. And the baroque Church of the Holy Trinity has crowned the hill above since the seventeenth century.
And by the way, a 25 is also perfect for the tree-lined path up that hill, where the branches close over and a child will carry the racquet the whole way rather than hand it to you.
Buy on Amazon
