This morning, after the rain had stopped, while Dominica was doing the absolute final touches on the house and all of the stuff was in the car and ready to go, I took a walk around the mountain to the south of the village and up to the forest and took some pictures and videos while up there. It was a bit of a walk but we have not had a sunny day in Baita in almost two months and I wanted to have some footage to share with everyone and this was the only chance that we had to get it. It’s been raining non-stop this week, as well. I love the rain, but it makes filming anything very, very hard.
Once I was done, it was time to say our final goodbyes. I walked over and said goodbye to Iakob, our priest who lives across the street, our hosts came and got the keys to the house, and we were loaded up into the car.
Down the driveway, past the church and the school, down the long road out of Baita and out to the highway. Our time in Baita is done. Goodbye little town where we lived for the season. We hope to see you again in nine months.
The drive south to Brasov went quite well. In fact, it wasn’t “that” late when we drove through Brasov and I was feeling pretty good about the drive so we decided to just pass right on through and continue on towards Bucharest. Why stop short just to have to get up early, very early, and drive it tomorrow since we know that we have to deal with finding a car wash once we get there and if we arrive too late in the day that we will have a problem finding one that is open. So instead we just pushed on.
It was pretty late, like three or four in the morning, when we got into Bucharest. Finding out hotel was not too bad. Parking was a bit of a problem but we got into our suite – which was actually two nice adjoining rooms and we were very happy. The girls loved that they got their very own hotel room. This is their first time getting a whole hotel room to themselves. So we were able to close to adjoining door and have some quiet time and they could play and not bother us. The hotel was quite nice in general and we were very happy.
It was actually so late (or early) that breakfast was already set up! So we had a quick breakfast before going to bed. So we kind of got an extra free meal out of the deal. Awesome.
We are very happy with the hotel and will be staying here tomorrow night as well. Tomorrow night was the only scheduled night for us. Tomorrow we will be in Bucharest all day running errands and getting ready for our early flight out of Romania. So the sixteenth is a Romanian logistics day. The seventeenth we fly from Bucharest to Istanbul, then a short layover and Istanbul to New York City where we are immediately renting a car and driving to Utica. That is going to be one long day.
But for tonight, it is time to sleep and tomorrow we have much less that we have to do that for which we were originally scheduled. We are super glad now that we pushed on to Bucharest. As tired as we are, we get to rest so much better and do not have to drive tomorrow and our only really critical thing is finding a car wash.