Friday Night in Transylvania

As you know, for the last two weeks I had the joy of being accompanied on my vacation by my sister Beverly and niece Jenni. They came all the way from Canada to visit me in Chisinau and then to travel with me to Vienna, a city none of us had previously visited. We planned to leave Friday morning and hoped to get 2/3 of the way across Romania by nightfall. The drive through Romania was quite lovely. On first crossing the border (a fairly complicated process with the first inkling of the challenge various currencies would be!) we headed north to Iasi (pronounced yash). We passed through small villages where Bev and Jenni got some sense of the simplicity of life in the country that seems from another era altogether: wagons and horses, grass-cutting with scythes, people carrying buckets of water from the local well.
Iasi is more advanced, though – a nice city/university town where we stopped for lunch. Then in my trusty little Ford Sierra, we began our trek through the Carpathian Mountains. We stopped to see one of the Romanian monasteries, Humorului, which was a lovely oasis of peace with well-tended garden, ancient frescoes on the walls of the chapel inside and out and a sense of constancy in a changing world. Outside its walls, though, we were swarmed by vendors at the first indication of interest in any of the lovely handcrafts and goods displayed for sale to the tourists who come to see the monastery.
As we proceeded through the mountains we managed to maintain our schedule in spite of the incredible amount of construction underway. In some places there were lights (sometimes ignored!, but not by us)to regulate long single-lane stretches of construction, but sometimes there wasn’t even a flag-person! The driving was definitely a challenge.
As night began to fall we decided to make the push to get to Bratitsa to stay overnight. Then suddenly in the dusk on the crest of a hill before us we saw ‘Dracula’s Castle Hotel’. Jenni and I had seen this on the internet and thought it would be a neat place to stay. How pleased we were to see it there! We booked into an apartment/room with a view of the mountains that was awesome. Throughout the trip we had nothing but sunshine before and after, but that night in Transylvania we could watch a spectacular lightning storm over the mountains from our ‘castle’ windows. Even so, that Friday night nothing (and nobody!) disturbed our sleep in Transylvania.