Sheep Guarding Llama

Hard to believe that we have only a little over two weeks left here in Romania before we need to be headed back to the States!  Today is our last planned run to the grocery store to get stocked up on all of the stuff that we will need for the remainder of our time here.  Always a sad moment.

Our morning went well.  It was raining all morning.  Liesl had a very productive day of school.  She covered a lot of stuff and it all went really well and there was basically no fighting which is a huge achievement here.

Luciana finally got Minecraft PE working on the tablets so that we can play together so I put in a little time playing that with her this morning as she has been waiting months for that to work again.

We went to the grocery store at three this afternoon and got way more groceries that we should have.  Seven hundred leu worth of them!  We had better not need any more while we are here!

We came straight home and Dominica made hot dogs for dinner.  Liesl ate over six and Luciana ate a full seven!

I watched The Ridiculous Six this evening which is, I believe, the first commissioned Netflix original movie.  It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great.  Lots of great people, what a lineup and filmed in 4K which is nice, but it was only so so.  But when you consider that it was a made for TV movie, sort of, it was pretty impressive!  It definitely looked and felt like a big budget Hollywood film.

Today is our first full day back in Transylvania.  Time to get settled back into the routine of being at home.  Also we are into our home stretch while here in Transylvania, only two and a half weeks until we are headed off to Istanbul and from there, on to New York.  Our time in Romania has really flown by.

It is a bit weird seeing the different places that we live and which ones give a sense of being a place that we got to live in for a long time and which ones seem to have just flown by.

Today is the four year anniversary of being in Hallstatt, Austria and Liesl doing her photo shoot in the dirndl that became so famous and from which dad made Liesl’s coffee table book.  Four years, I can’t believe it. Hallstatt remains the most iconic bit of Europe in my mind, even all these years and places later.  Say Europe, and that’s what I picture.

This week we finally had the exhaustion of all of the stuff that we have been doing really hit us and I started falling behind on SGL.  This would end up being the biggest gap in posting regularly that I have had in many years.  It’s nearly two and a half months later that I am finally able to get this update posted!

I was working online for most of the day.  Sitting at the desk looking out on the little side street in Baita.  We leave here so soon, we are really going to miss it.  I hate coming to the end of our time in any place that we go, you start to miss it even before you have to leave, you know that it is all going to go away and you wish that you could have had so much more time to do so many more things.

Had my usual phone call this evening, and then relaxed with the family.

We started the morning on the train from Bucharest.  We had to be up a little after five to be ready for our arrival in Beclean around six.  For the last twenty or thirty minutes of the trip we could recognize everything out of the window because the train followed our normal driving road into Beclean which we have done several times.  For the hour before that everything looked familiar as we went through the area that we know well near where we have been living.

We got off of the train at six in the morning.  We were honestly pretty nervous to find out if our car would still be waiting for us or not.  Ten days is a LONG time to leave your car for the first time at a train station in a place where you have no way to be contacted and know of no one to check on it.  We were quite quick to go look to see if the car was there, and it was.  It was completely covered in bird poo, but it was there.

We loaded up and got under way to drive back home.  We were excited to be getting home after so long away.  Being continuously away from home does wear on you a bit.

On the drive home we all decided that we were hungry and that we would attempt a stop at a pensiune of which we knew that was located just before we would get back to Baita at the south side of the plateau that we have to drive up.  We have looked at it a few times and wondered who goes there and what it is like, so this was a perfect time to see if they could do breakfast.

We arrived at the pensiune at seven and while we were the only people there, they were able to do breakfast!  We ate breakfast and were off to our house.  Great to be home, time to relax.

Today was a very quiet day for us.  All of us were ready to crash and Dominica and the girls ended up napping and sleeping for much of the day.  I managed to stay up and work on attempting to do some catch up from the time away but, in the end, was off to bed pretty early myself.

Today is our crazy, long, exhausting travel day.  All travel, all day.  Nothing but travel.  And we will not arrive until late tomorrow morning.  So it is going to be over twenty four hours of non-stop travel for us, in fact.

We were not sure if we were going to be able to buy tickets with a credit card and we did not want to carry all kind of Bulgarian cash as we leave the country, our stash of foreign cash in all kinds of currencies is becoming a little bit of a problem, so we decided that I should go down to the train station on my own early this morning while Dominica worked on packing and getting the girls ready to go.

Getting a taxi can be time consuming and I am a fast walker on my own so I walked to the train station.  The walk to it was easy, mostly downhill and the sun was not out yet.  Unfortunately, getting to the train station was easy but stepping inside it was a sauna and I was hot and sweaty pretty much instantly.

The station did not speak English and it turned out that we could not buy our tickets here because we needed International tickets.  What a pain.  But because we only had to buy the local train it was just 5.20 BGN (which is about $2.75.)  I had that in cash so was able to buy our ticket to two stations away at Gorda so we would be able to take the morning train and buy our big ticket down the tracks a bit at the big station.

It took me just long enough to buy the tickets that every taxi at the train station had pulled away leaving me without time to find one and needing to get back to the apartment quickly so that we could get back to make our train!  So I had to now walk even more quickly than before while going uphill instead of downhill.  No fun.  This would have been okay but the sun came out and it started getting pretty warm.

I got back and had to shower and change quickly as we were very much out of time as everything this morning took far longer than we had anticipated and no one was ready to go when I got home, either.  So it was a bit of a rush.

Once ready we checked out, left cash for the apartment as they had never collected the money for the last day that we had stayed, and ran down to grab a taxi in the square.  Once we had a taxi we knew that we were only five minutes away and that we had time to relax.

At the train station we had about half an hour to sit.  I walked over to the quick market next to the station with Luciana and we picked up 7-Day croissants and coffee to take back.

The train from Tarnovo to Gorda was only about twenty minutes.  Arriving there we had about an hour, maybe ninety minutes, to get things sorted and ready for the next train.  Here we easily found the international ticket office where they spoke English and we got our tickets to Bucharest for just $35 for the four of us!

While we were waiting at Gorda we were able to get four (because we all love it) big cups of steamed corn as a snack and I was able to charge my iPhone as there was power there and no one trying to use it.

Our train north from Gorda to Bucharest was easy and comfortable.  I did get to witness a “stow away” Roma get caught and try to leap from the train at full speed to escape the authorities.  He got caught twice attempting to open the outside door to escape.  It was interesting to see it in action.  Real life here, nothing hidden.

We did not have power on this train, as we did not the other day, so it was good that we had charged the phones and were ready for it.  The train was very warm, all sun today, but it was all fine.

It was a long ride from Tarnovo to Bucharest, it was a long day.  But we have nowhere to be and nothing to do so it was not a big deal that we spent the day on the train.  It was downtime.

It was late afternoon, around five, when we arrived at Bucharest’s Gara de Nord again.  We are used to this train station by now, this being our third time using it and the first time we were here for many hours and this time we are here for a long time again.

The girls just love eating at Subway and since there is one here we did that again for them.  We just got the girls food, Dominica and I wanted something else.  Lots of time to kill so no problem at all.

Dominica and I got dinner at Spring Time, a vegetarian friendly fresh food place by the Subway.  Dominica got falafel and I got a veggie burger that turned out to be amazing.  We will eat here again next time we are at Gara de Nord.  It was delicious and healthy.

We had many hours to kill until our overnight train was ready so we settled into So! Coffee, found their air conditioned room and camped out.  We pretty much had the place to ourselves for hours.  It was awesome.  Best place to kill time at Gara de Nord.  Great coffee, hot chocolate, warm space, cool space, a relatively private bathroom, snacks, wifi and a good location to see the scheduling board.  You won’t miss your train here.

We boarded as soon as we felt that we could get onto the train, so about a quarter after eight.  We got settled into the train and were ready for a comfortable evening.  This is a long overnight running from the south of Romania nearly all of the way to the Ukraine and we are riding nearly to the end; but not entirely to the end which means that we have to be careful not to oversleep and miss our stop.

Unfortunately tonight we had the berth next to us full of rowdy high school boys, six of them that we can’t even figure out how they fit into a berth. They were so loud that it felt like they were talking in the berth with us and they were constantly punching and kicking the walls and made the bathrooms so awful that we had to go to other train cars in order to use them!  It was ridiculous.  Extra train security was moved into our car to keep an eye on them.  We ended up with three conductors spending the night.  At least we were extra safe.  They weren’t dangerous, just extraordinarily rude and disgusting.

Tonight it was me that was unable to sleep.  The power went off often enough that I could not get sleep.  It was pretty bad and I had diaphragm distress during the night.  It was exhausting and I felt awful from it.  The girls slept great, they just love train overnights.  They are so small that the beds are luxurious for them and they don’t care about the power.  For everyone except Dominica the movement of the train just lulls us off to sleep.

We have to be up very early tomorrow morning to make our stop.

I was up long before everyone else this morning so I went out for a long morning walk on my own to do some exploring.  I can walk so much farther than everyone else that this just makes sense most days.  Today I started by going down and finding the footbridge that goes from the new town over to the peninsula where the giant monument and the art museum are.  It was a good walk and I got to see some neat stuff.  I walked back on the peninsula and found a massive staircase that just went up and up to the top of the hill and started a nature trail there.  There was even a playground at the top of the hill, but far too much walking to consider taking the girls there.  I have no idea who would use that playground.

It was a long walk, over an hour, maybe close to two, by the time that I got back home.  I got some good pictures, though.  And I got some serious exercise.

Once home I showered and we all went right across the “street” which is car free, just a pedestrian way, to the Alegro Hotel and sat outside and had a late breakfast or early lunch.  The girls loved that a cat came and was all over us while we ate and even hopped onto the middle level of our table and made itself at home there.  Restaurant cats are their new favourite thing.

After breakfast we found a taxi to take us to the Tsarevets Fortress which is the focal point of the city.  This is the old fortress of the tsars of the Second Bulgarian Empire and a major historical site.  We could have walked but that would have left us very tired before we even got started for the day.  It was already getting close to ninety degrees and full on sun when we started so this was going to be very hot and our clothes are all rather heavy as we had no plans to be anywhere that wasn’t relatively cool for our entire cycle in Europe this winter and spring.  So we are melting.

The tickets to the Tsarevets were very cheap.  It is all outdoors and you just walk around.  You take a long bridge over the ravine and then climb into the old fortress.  It was really cool.

The girls enjoyed it but it was a lot of walking and, more importantly, a lot of climbing over rough terrain and ancient steps for a long time.  We were all exhausted and hot by the time that we got up to the top and I had to carry Luciana for a lot of it.

There was a neat, recreated church at the very peak which we checked out.  And we walked all over the grounds.  It was a good, historical experience.  It wore on the kids, though.  We are very glad that we did it, but we were tired quickly.

After we were done in the Tsarevets, it was probably two hours there, we hit a nice restaurant right at the entrance to the bridge to it and had a nice meal of traditional Bulgarian food.  Light stuff that was refreshing and we were quickly feeling better.

After our meal we decided to skip the taxi and walk back.  It really was not all that far and it took us down the old town shopping district again.  We stopped and got candy again for the girls.

Before getting back to the apartment we stopped and got steamed corn again.  The girls love it.  Nothing like steamed veggies as a street food snack.  This is awesome.

We relaxed at the apartment for about an hour and then went out and got take away falafel from the Bulgarian chain place Aladin Foods which turned out to be awesome.  Their falafel was so huge and filled with French fries and all kinds of stuff, it was great.  And the price was insane.  We bought way too much food for the four of us for just over three dollars!  We could have pretty easily eaten for just over two dollars had we known how big everything was!

After we ate, Luciana and I went out for a walk together to try to find more steamed corn but they had packed up and left by the time that we got there.  It was a nice little walk together, though.

Off to bed full of falafel.  This is our last night in Bulgaria.  Getting the train tomorrow and going back through Bucharest and on to Transylvania all in one day.  That is going to be one long day for us.