Sheep Guarding Llama

We slept in a little this morning.  We had originally planned to be driving all morning.  So this is very nice already being in Bucharest.  Today is just our buffer time and time to run errands so, unless there is some disaster, we mostly just get to relax.  Tomorrow is Istanbul, but today there is no travel at all.  This is our last full day in Romania, though, and that makes us sad.  We love it here.  Our visas are nearly exhausted, though.  Time to get back to the States and let our visas and passports rest for a while.  What a spring it has been!

Our main job for the day is finding a car wash and getting the car detailed.  That was part of the deal with our three month rental at such an amazing price.  We got a great deal, but the car had to be detailed when we returned it.  A huge pain, but boy was it cheap and the car was really great.  So no real complaints there, even though putting up with this today is awful.

We tried following some Google Map directions to find a detailing place and got led on a wild goose chase into a residential area.  I really am sick of Google Maps, it is worse than useless most of the time.  We tried to take the main highway and look for a place to eat, too, and that did not go well. We eventually wasted too much time looking for a place to eat that Dominica wanted and I put my foot down and drove us back to the McDonald’s right across from the hotel.  It was the only obvious restaurant that we knew where it was and it was extremely close and easy and would let us not be starving while we worked on finding a car wash place.  Or maybe we could even ask someone.

We pulled in to the McDonald’s and the parking lot was quite busy.  While driving around looking for a spot we noticed that the back side of the restaurant parking lot was shared with…. a car wash!  Bingo.

So we got lunch and sat outside and let the girls play in the jungle gym thing that they have for a long time while we ate.  McDonald’s food in Romania is much better than in the US. I got a smoked salmon salad, for example.  And the girls each got their very first Happy Meal!

Luciana got trapped in the gym thing and Liesl had to go save her.  This seems to happen a lot with this enclosed jungle gym things.

We had a really nice, long relaxing time at McDonald’s knowing that our one major errand of the day was all figured out and solved.  We had nothing to worry about now.

After our meal, we went back and had to wait maybe twenty minutes before they could wash the car.  They did a great job and it was so cheap.  Like eight dollars for a complete detailing!  We are so glad that we found that place.  Everyone was really nice and helpful, too.

We went back to the hotel and just hung out all afternoon.  We ordered in pizza for dinner and got to bed very early.  We need our sleep, tomorrow is going to be a very, very long day.  The girls loved the hotel.  Having a room to themselves was a special treat.

Tomorrow we have to get up and return the car and catch our flight very early in the morning.  And we will be in New York by late tomorrow night.  Hard to believe.

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.

Today is the last day for the packing.  We head out tomorrow.  So much to do.  Writing, posting, packing, cleaning.  The girls want to play with their friends and see the dogs before we leave. So busy, and so tired.  We have loved our time in the village of Baita and are really looking forward to coming back here again.  We hope that we can be here, maybe even in the same house again, in the spring of 2017.  This has been such a good experience for the whole family.  The girls have been just so happy here.

After today Dominica is very exhausted.  Packing falls almost entirely to her, this is her biggest work load at any given time in our travel cycles.  I am terrible with both packing and planning, so she really gets a work out on these prep days.

Our plan is to leave tomorrow and drive to Brasov in the Carpathian Mountains, spent the night tomorrow night and then drive on to Bucharest first thing on the following day so that we have a good amount of the afternoon to deal with all of our logistics in Bucharest and be all set for our flight the next day.  It’s our major international travel day, so leaving nothing to chance that we don’t have to.  Leaving lots of time built into the plans for things to go wrong.

At this point, I’ve already been off of SGL for about a week and falling behind very quickly.  We’ve been busy with travel all over, then seeing village friends all weekend, then catching up and staying caught up on writing, getting the house packed and everything.  Just no spare time at all.  SGL is suffering a lot, I’m afraid.  There is very little that can be done about that.  I hope to be catching up soon, but it is going to be a monumental effort.

This travel life is exciting, but exhausting too.

And thus begins our last week in Romania.  Today the hard core packing begins.  We leave Transylvania in two days to stage ourselves in the capital to get ready for our flight to Istanbul and on to New York.  There is always so much to do right at the end.  So many things that we wish that we could have done while we were still in a place.  And so much not wanting to leave, yet.

I worked most of the day.  I want to get as much writing and posting done today and tomorrow before we begin our travelling so that I am not getting behind.

Dominica got a lot of packing done today, but there is still plenty to do tomorrow.  Packing to leave is actually much easier than packing to go because we have to collect absolutely everything.  But there is much cleaning to be done, as well.

We ate the marshmallow sandwiches that we got from Turda today.

We had to get up and get moving this morning.  Dominica wanted to do some shoe shopping in Targu Mures before we went to Nikoli and Maria’s home for lunch.  Targu Mures is about an hour drive from Baita and the kids take forever to get ready to leave the house so it takes rather a bit of effort to get out the door in time for just about anything.

We had to be on the road by not much after ten.  The weather was nice and we had a fine drive down south to the county seat.  In Targu Mures we had been told that there was a shopping mall called the Promenade that would have plenty of shoe stores and stuff for us to the west of town.  It ended up being easy to find and we thought that it was very funny that this fancy American style shopping mall was located across the road from a coal power plant.  But in reality, malls are completely inward facing and have no views and shut you off from the outside world and are surrounded by ugly parking lots and so putting one next to the huge eye soar of a coal power plant is actually an excellent use of the space.  Save the nice stuff for places where people will look at it.  So quite smart, I think.

The mall was not huge by any stretch, but it had a fair amount of stuff including even a grocery store.  Lots of great looking restaurants in there, too.  Most with posted vegetarian menus even.

Dominica ended up being able to find a pair of sneakers from an outlet store at the mall.  She now has shiny gold sneakers that definitely scream “Romania.”

The shopping trip took us until around one o’clock and it was time to find our way to Nikoli and Maria’s house which is up on the hill overlooking the city near the zoo.  We did pretty well finding out way there.  Their house is new construction high on the hill over the city with amazing, commanding views over nearly the entire Targu Mures region.

We got a tour of the new house.  The house started buying built in 2012 and is mostly done but has some work left to go.  The views were just crazy so I grabbed the GoPro and got some shots as well as some panoramic shots from the iPhone.

Maria made lunch, which was cheese, caprese and grilled veggies for starters.  Then we had Romanian salad soup with cheesy polenta which is very good.  Then we had potatoes and corn breaded, fried trout which was awesome.  Mihai and Tudor taught us how Europeans eat fish by ripping off the tail and the head, then splitting the fish open and ripping out the bones to make eating it easier.  Although I am not convinced that my way still isn’t easier.

Lunch was great.  Then we sat for a little while waiting for the rain to lessen before we all set out for a walk, except for Tudor who had to go back to work, through the municipal park to the Targu Mures Zoo.

Targu Mures has one of the better zoos in Romania and they have an excellent city park system leading to it which is in just the most beautiful spot, is fed by public transportation, has loads of activities for the kids and lot of food including restaurants and what we would consider carnival style food in the States like fried dough, popcorn and cotton candy.  There is even a mojito stand!

We had a nice time at the zoo.  It was raining but we had brought umbrellas with us so that was not too bad and it did not rain very hard.  We got a pull behind cart to put the girls in so Nikoli and I took turns hauling the girls through the zoo.  They enjoyed getting to ride in the little cart.  It made for a lot of exercise for us, though.

We saw monkeys (I even got to pet one) and a lot of stuff. It is a decent zoo for such a small city.  By the time that we were done, though, the rain had picked up a lot and we were getting very wet.  Tudor ended up running up to pick us up and drive us back (as he had a van) so we did not have to walk the exposed final half kilometre back to the house in the rain.

We went back to the house and just hung out for the evening.  Mostly just standing out on the balcony looking out over the city.  The girls had a great time playing with everyone in the big, empty house.  They did not want to leave at all when it came time to be getting ready to go.  They wanted to spend the night, which we were invited to do, but without my CPAP and with so much to do this week to get ready to go back to the States we need time at the house.

It was ten when we left Targu Mures.  We drove Mihai down to his apartment downtown and then drove back to Baita getting in around eleven.  We were all really tired.  Pretty much everyone was off to bed as soon as they got home.  I stayed up working on getting videos uploaded to YouTube as there was a lot of stuff to get uploaded and we have a dedicated Don’t Forget to Pack the Kids TV page now.