Still some adventure in our lives Part 1

We have lived in Eastern Europe now for almost three years and so many things that used to be "adventurous" are now just ho hum day to day things.  The visitor may find them to be an exciting adventure but for the Stevens family it is just life.  But this month Eastern Europe came through - more specifically the former Yugoslavia and we got a big dose of adventure. Our team was having a retreat in Slovenia and little did we know the weekend would be full of adventure. 
As we were traveling to Slovenia we came across a little traffic jam.
When you see the following picture. what comes to mind?

 

Things like:

Wow that must be a massive wreck up ahead!

Maybe there is some road construction.

Is a bridge out? 

The options are limitless but I promise the reason for this traffic jam would never ocur to you in a thousand years.

As we were stopped (cars turned off, people out milling around, we were not only stopped,

 we were parked) we had these thoughts as well as some outragous ones.  We really had one clue as to why we were stopped.  It was this sign:

The exclamation usually means warning, so we assumed there was some danger  and the text basically says closed due to clearance, so that leaves us thinking what were they clearing.  If we go to our earlier list this all makes sense but the bottom part of the sign basically says that trafic will move the first 20 minutes of every hour so it could not be a wreck, this was the clearance of something planned.  No one seemed to be to put out by this so we just rolled with it and eventually moved on.  The problem was we never saw anything being cleared, no wreck, no bridge, no construction. 
We were ahead of our traveling party so we texted them and told them they would be held up a little but it was no big deal and they would get to Slovenia.  Still very curious about what was going on we hoped they could find out.
As we were pulling into our destination Jen got the following text:
Traffic is stopped because they are clearing landmines!!! The government does not want any cars around in case something goes wrong. (that can be interpreted as landmines start exploding and throw shrapnel all over the road).
Now be honest, did that cross your mind as a reason for a traffic jam?  Me neither.
On our way home, we were very observant and did see guys in millitary fatigues right off the road ready to search for active landmines.
Keep reading later this week as the adventures and hijinks continue.