Sheep Guarding Llama

We woke up this morning to a gorgeous day in Timisoara, Romania.  We are all very excited as our first new country lies just about an hour away to the south.  It is Thursday and we really have only the loosest of plans which is exactly how a good road trip should be.  It has been a long time since we did anything like this.  We did a small trip this past weekend, but a weekend trip is nothing like this.  Lots of people do weekends trips, maybe not at as much of a drop of a hat as we do, but they do them.  But we are doing more countries in a week than most people do in a lifetime.  So, this is a little bit crazy.

We did pretty well this morning, having very little to do.  None of us had a tonne of sleep having gotten in so late last night but we were dressed and out the door and on the road before ten, maybe even around nine, which gave us nice morning sunlight for our drive.

The land to the south of Timisoara (we started this morning south of the city) and towards Serbia is very flat.  Romania, on this morning’s drive, was golden fields in full bloom.  Some of the biggest, yellowist endless fields stretching out to the horizon.  Very stunning.  We were surprised at how different it looks here than anywhere in Romania that we have been thus far.

It was still late morning when we arrived at the Serbian border.  The border crossing was painless.  We went through a Romanian exit control that looked at our car papers and such but was very easy.  Then went through the Serbian border with nothing more than a quick glance at our passports by a border agent who was engrossed in a conversation on his cell phone so we were not going to get the third degree for sure as he just wanted to make sure we were legal and move us along, which he did.  And we are into Serbia!

We were shocked to discovered that for the first half of an hour at least, in Serbia, we encountered no one.  Just, no one.  It was an empty, but beautiful, place.  No cars, no people, no houses.   Just flat, nicely maintained fields.  The lack of people crossing the largest Romanian – Serbian border crossing point (the point that connects Serbia’s capital and largest city with its nearest Romanian counterpart and one of Romania’s largest cities) had zero traffic in either direction.  No one was at the border crossing with us, either, of course.  At least on the Romanian side of the border there was local traffic so people were everywhere, right up to the crossing.  But in Serbia, it was a hinterland, to say the least.

Eventually we spotted a neat Serbian village along the base of a small mountain off in the distance to the left which would be roughly south west and then, in not too long, we came upon a small city that we drove right through.  The city was nice, poorly market as far as where the road went through it, but the city itself was pretty and pleasant and appeared to be quite a nice place.  Lots of nice houses.

Every country has its own style, of course, and Serbia heavily resembles the village and city structure of Romania but with a slightly different architectural flair and an odd mix of Romanianesque houses mixed with giant in-village Serbian McMansions that are rather surprising to discover.  We find that discovering these unique differences in countries and regions to be endlessly entertaining.  You can really identify where you are by the houses and village structure if you are used to different area.

We did not stop in northern Serbia and sped right on to the capital, Belgrade (Beograd), the White City.  I sent a message to a friend (from Spiceworks) who lives in Belgrade but we were unable to make connections before we had passed through the city.   We knew that our time was short so we are not stopping in Belgrade on this trip but we did want to pass through it and get to see it.  Belgrade is such an important city that we did not want to miss it, but Serbia is not a major destination on this grand tour , plus we plan to be back in Serbia in a week’s time, anyway.  So who knows where we might be staying at that point or what we might get to see.

We only got the drive-through of Belgrade but what we saw was very nice and the downtown area was really impressive.  Belgrade is the old Yugoslavian capital and has the infrastructure that you would imagine from that history; and it remains the capital of Serbia which is the largest of the countries to be derived from the old conglomeration.  It is a large, well maintained and impressive city with giant buildings and good roads.  We hope to get a chance to return and explore it more thoroughly some day.

Leaving Belgrade we drove past the airport and stopped for gas and some chips and such from the gas station so that we could eat in the car.  The girls were getting hungry but we did not want to stop in Belgrade itself because that would have been complex with parking and finding a good place.  So our deal was that we were going to look for a restaurant to stop at once we were past the city and then we could get a late lunch and a break from the car.

Oddly, we actually ended up crossing the entire country without finding a place to eat.  We started seeing some in the west, but because of the time of day none appeared to be open!  That is the problem with travelling in Europe, you often hit different regions where things are all closed at certain times of the day; then you go on to another region when everything is closed at another time and soon nothing is open for you at all.

So without intending to, we flew through Serbia with blinding speed and within a few hours found ourselves driving along the river looking at Bosnia on the other side and then went right past our nearly inivisible border crossing and had to turn around and go back.  Serbia was a very pretty country and seems really nice, and we got to see all of it from edge to edge including seeing the capital and largest city as well as the touristy western area where the flat plains start to turn into mountains.

It was late afternoon when we turned into the Bosnian border crossing and got our first issue of the trip – our green card does not cover Bosnia (nor Macedonia or Kosovo, it turns out) and we have an insurance problem.  Bosnia was also not exactly impressed that our green card was a copy and not the original.

So we got pulled over and stuck in border control.  Dominica had to stay with the girls in the car and I was sent off on foot to look for insurance.  I did not understand the instructions that I was given too clearly and did a bit of walking around without being able to find the insurance place and then had to go back to the border without the insurance.

Border control was laughing at me when I returned because they were able to see me walking all around being lost.  They gave me new directions and I was able to figure to go this time and I managed to get three days of Bosnian insurance for twenty one Euros, got my paperwork and was able to present it to Bosnian border control and they let us into the country.  They were very friendly and helpful and clearly interesting in putting on a good experience for people entering the country.

The moment we crossed into Bosnia we were presented with amazing views of the mountains across the river in the low sunlight.  The road that we were taking turned to the south and ran down along the river hugging the river as mountains spilled down to the river so there were a lot of tunnels and winding parts.

After about twenty minutes into Bosnia we ended up in stopped traffic. There had been an accident in a tunnel somewhere in front of us and we were stuck. No one was going anywhere.  I got out of the car to investigate since the whole road was people out of their cars.  It looked like we were going to be there for hours.  So we turned around and drove back up, all of the way to the border crossing and went another way, the long way around which took us up into the hills on smaller roads.  Not ideal and we lost a lot of time, but at least we were moving.

Eventually we got out onto something of a highway and in the late afternoon we managed to find a truck stop motel that seemed nice.  Luciana had a bathroom pit stop emergency so we had to ask for a bathroom and it turned out to be in the first floor restaurant and since we were already up there Liesl and I looked at a menu and we decided that since we had missed all of the meals all day and we were already here that this is where we should eat.  It was a big complex along the highway but we were the only people in the rather large restaurant.

We got pizzas, two of them in fact, plus a big bowl of pasta, four coffees (the girls did not drink coffee but Dominica and I each had two) and then we wrapped up the meal with a traditional Bosnian dessert and we were amazing to discover that the Bosnian Konvertable Marke (KM) is two to the Euro and the entire meal came out to a whopping fourteen dollars!  That is making the trip very cheap, very quickly if that is all that things cost in Bosnia.  This is awesome.

We tried a traditional Bosnia dessert called hurmašica which was quite good.

All of the drive in Bosnia was stunning.  The landscape lacks anything resembling the concept of flat.  Bosnia is, in would appear, the anti-flat country.  We knew that Bosnia was the mountainous centre of the old Yugoslavia and that what made it Bosnia was the mountain culture that had developed there, so we were not entirely surprised by this.  But the degree to which Bosnia is mountains is a bit extreme.  The part that we saw was entirely mountains, from edge to edge.  Nothing but mountains.  And mostly really high mountains, too.

We got to see a lot of really stunning Bosnian terrain before the sun went down.  Our goal for tonight is to get to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital.  It is one of our “must see” Bosnian destinations.

It was turning to darkness as we climbed into the really high Bosnian mountains.  Much of what we saw, especially as it was getting dark, was what appeared a lot like a combination of slightly modified Swiss chalets mixed in with mosques, mosques everywhere.  A lot of churches, too, but so many mosques.  Minarets dot the skyline much like you expect steeples in a New England painting.

The drive through the mountains was a bit much for Dominica who felt awful from her motion sickness for much of the drive. We did go through some incredibly beautiful (at least at night) small cities up in the mountains.

It was something like nine in the evening when we came into Sarajevo.  We were surprised to find that it looked a lot like Ithaca, New York, but ten times the size.  It has a similar “downtown in the valley, houses on the hills” feeling that Ithaca does.  It’s a very vertical city.  When you are dowtown you don’t see stars above you, you see more of the city up in the sky.  Driving along one of the ridges you got lots of light coming at you from the side from the wall of the city rising on the opposite ridge.  I love cities like this, it is like you can see all of the city from anywhere in the city.  It really gives you a feeling of being in the place and feeling connected to everyone else because you can see so much more of the city than you normally can.

We drove around a lot trying to figure out where our apartment for the night is.  Dominica got one of the “Genius Deals” tonight which got us what appeared to be an amazing apartment right in the old city (stari grad) for just seventeen dollars American which seems impossible.

Sarajevo has terrible driving.  Tight, steep streets, twisting and turning all over the place.  It is impossible to navigate and nearly impossible to drive.  Very stressful and the city is full of people who know their way around and think that you are in the way.  Not fun driving at all.

The apartment owners were not able to coordinate someone to get us into the apartment for about half an hour after we arrived so we found a quiet spot to park and sat for a little while which I really appreciated since I was exhausted from having driven the entire day (other than the hiking around that I had done looking to get us Bosnian car insurance) and this last bit of driving was fatiguing me very quickly.  So this was a good break before having to do it again.

We met up with Mohammad showing us the apartment at a quarter till ten.  The apartment is actually down on a main street, so easy to deal with, but hard to get to and from.  We were told that there would be simple on site parking but when we got there Mohammad discovered someone parked in his garage so he had to find us street parking up in the twisting hillside streets.  Ugh.

We found a back street and he helped us park on a sidewalk up against a building.  What a way to have to deal with your car here.  He loaded us up in his car and drove us back to the apartment with our luggage.  Who knows how we will deal with the luggage tomorrow.  The car is way up the hill and we won’t have a chauffeur to get us up to it in the morning.

We got into the apartment which was totally gorgeous.  Very cool place in an ancient building right next to the country’s oldest mosque and the city’s big library which itself is a bit of a landmark.  The apartment has one entrance on to the main street and the back entrance goes straight into the old town!  Very neat.  The apartment itself was quite comfortable with a big living room with a convertible couch for the girls and a bedroom for Dominica and me.

Once Mohammad was done getting us settled in, he took off.  Then I went for a walk up the hill to make sure that I knew how to find the car again and how to drive the car back to the apartment because any wrong turn tomorrow could result in my getting lost and being unable to get back to the apartment which would be a major problem.

It was a bit of a walk, mostly because of the steep incline and crazy back streets.  But I found the car without too much effort.  On the way back to the house I went past the nation’s oldest Orthodox church, took a picture of it while I was there, and then came upon a late night bakery that was still open!  By this time it was actually after midnight, we lost a lot of time dealing with the logistics of getting into the apartment, and I stopped in to see what they had because we had not managed to get any food today except for the late lunch stop at the truck stop.  The girls were looking for food but we had just not had any reasonable opportunity to tackle that until this point.

I got a load of different pastries.  There are a lot of pastries that seem to be common to the entire Balkan region as much of it is the same as far down in Greece.  I got several different things hoping that the girls would like something.

I got back to the apartment and we set up the food in the living room and ate.  The surprise find was that both girls liked the potato filled filo pastries.  We all ate and then got the girls tucked into bed.

Our night did not stop there, however.  We quickly found that our toilet broke and would not stop running nor would it flush.  Something in the flushing mechanism was stuck but we could not fix it nor even get it open to look at.  One of the dangers of being in a new region is that simple things like toilets are often wildly different than you have ever seen before and you have no context for working on them.  Fixes that might be simple to someone local might seem impossible.  These toilets are fairly American-like in style except that they flush with a start/stop button and this one got jammed into the start position and there was no way to push the stop (nor could it stop on its own like it is supposed to.)  The idea that you can stop it short is very handy, until it breaks.

So we contacted the owner of the apartment, but he did not know how it worked either and we spent a lot of time trying to explain what was wrong and trying to explain that we were not stupid Americans that could not figure out how to press the stop button.  While we were trying to figure that out, we discovered that the hot water was not working either.  Not that it wasn’t hot, there was none.  If you put a faucet into the hot position no water would flow.  It is going to be a long night.

Dominica and I put in a lot of time doing plumbing troubleshooting.  We might have been at it, talking to the owner via WhatsApp, for nearly an hour.  We checked all of the plumbing everywhere, drained the hot water tank (it had less than a cup of water in it), took the wall plate off to see if there was something wrong back there and more.  Finally I managed to get the toilet taken apart, found the part that was stuck and managed to get the thing flushing manually, so at least we had some way to use the bathroom, now.

So it was nearly two when we turned in to go to bed.  Tomorrow we have a lot of driving to be doing as well, so we want to get some sleep but still get up early enough to visit the city of Sarajevo in the daylight before getting into the car to drive south to Mostar and Dubrovnik, Croatia.  We are working hard to get all of the big driving done right up front so that we can spend time exploring the lesser known portions of the Adriatic coast.

Today represented two more countries for the Miller family.  For Dominica and me that was countries twenty three and twenty four.  Liesl and Luciana are now up to twenty two.  According to Lonely Planet, we have now been to ten percent of all of the world’s countries.

We were very tired when we finally fell asleep in Sarajevo, Bosnia.  We did notice that on this trip we crossed back from Eastern European time, that we have been on since the first of January to Central European time.  So we gained an hour on our drive which was nice this direction but will not be nice going back.  We are one hour closer to back home, now.

It was a really gorgeous day in Baita this morning.  Getting the whole family to bed so early last night worked out well.  Everyone was up and ready early today.  Even Liesl was up before nine!  Luciana, however, got up and went back to bed and slept until noon.  She was clearly overly tired last night and needed a full twelve hours of sleep!

Dominica made the coffee and then joined me at my desk to talk about our upcoming travel plans to the Balkans.   We have had a rough idea of what we have wanted to do in mind for a while but sketched out the route and the stops today so that we could figure out how much we would need to schedule.  It is eight countries in about eight days, quite an undertaking.

After doing all of the plans and figuring out when Easter (which is the first of May here) was going to interrupt things we decided that it actually made the most sense for us to pack up and leave… today!

So a slow Wednesday turned into rather a hectic one.  Dominica had just done a load of laundry and was about to put it out on the line to dry.  That needed to be dry before we would be able to consider leaving.  And there is a lot of packing to be done, of course.  And just a lot to prep for an eight day, eight country excursion.  This is going to be crazy.  Like a smaller, but similar trip to our one in Europe in 2012.  This is a lot of countries, only one fewer than that one, in a much shorter window of eight days instead of six weeks.

So a bit of a crazy day trying to get everything ready to go and think of all of the things that need to be ready to deal with a massive travel undertaking like this.  What is funny is that while this is a bit of an epic trip, we don’t really feel like it is much of an undertaking.  Seven countries that we’ve never been to, all of which use an alphabet that we don’t know how to read, a few of which have poor road infrastructure, two language families we’ve never dealt with before and one break away republic with disputed borders.  And… who needs to plan?  Not us.  Pack some bags, jump in the car and book hotels while on the move.  Yee haw.

I had a call and was done at seven thirty, quite early for me on a Wednesday.  Dominica was all ready.  We went out to get into the car and our priest, Yakov (we don’t know how he spells it) was walking by.  I went out to inform him that we would be gone for a while so that no one would worry and he had me grab the girls because he had brand new baby piglets that were just born yesterday for us to go see!

We went to the farm for about half an hour.  It set us back on our time table rather a bit but boy was it worth it.  None of us have seen baby piglets up close and personal before and for eleven of them to be one day old and right next door was an experience not to be missed.

So it was after eight when we piled into our little Ford Focus and hit the road.  Late but not terribly late.  A decent enough time for starting on a major adventure.  Tonight definitely starts an adventure.

It was getting pretty dark when we set off.  We only had to go a very short distance, maybe ten minutes, before we turned off of the path that we knew and were off onto new roads into a new area of Romania and off to explore yet more of Eastern Europe.

Tonight’s driving goal, which is reasonably ambitious, is to make it all of the way to Timisoara in the far west of Romania.  The estimated drive was over six hours, which is nothing small, even for daytime driving.  This was almost entirely in the dark.

Sadly, we decided to use Google Maps to give us directions rather than just looking at the map.  This would turn out to be the first of many horrific driving decisions made by Google on this trip.  Instead of taking us on easy, large highways that would have gotten us to Timisoara pretty quickly, Google sent us off into the wilderness where we took one back road after another, many were not even paved.  This is bad enough under normal conditions but we are not used to these roads, do not know the area at all and Romanian roads, especially smaller ones, are full of people, dogs and horse drawn carts which have no reflectors on them normally so they are almost impossible to see in the near total darkness, which there is a lot of as most roads have no street lights.

The drive was a very, very slow one and incredibly stressful as I had to be insanely alert looking for all kinds of things in the road and always having to deal with slow trucks and fast people trying to pass us in the darkness and unmarked railroad tracks.  It was not a trivial drive to do for a long time all at night.  During the day this would not have been nearly so bad.

It was a challenging night, but we did eventually make it out to Timisoara after passing through several areas that were new to us.  We saw very few large settlements the entire way but did go through a couple of really neat small cities before getting out to our destination.

Driving through Timisoara was a bit of a goal, even though it is a very large city, because it is the home of the world’s fastest Internet access and it is a city that we are very interested in as a potential home in Romania because it is well situated in a great location, has great Internet, is a good size, etc.

Our goal was to get through the city and find a hotel on the far side of it to get as much of the driving out of the way tonight as possible but we did not want to try to tackle the Serbian border in the middle of the night – always an important driving tip.

Just a little ways south of the city we saw what looked like a nice hotel on the side of the road, the Hotel Aurelia.  Big and sort of fancy, the kind of place that would have all night staff.  So we pulled in and everyone stayed in the car while I went into investigate the potential situation.  I managed to get a giant room with a king bed for a pretty good price and since we were willing to skip breakfast we did not have to pay for the kids at all.

It was about two in the morning when we crashed at the hotel.  We were very ready to be out of the car.  The hotel room was great, we were glad that we chose this place.  It was very comfortable and the girls always prefer when we have a king bed because we have the space to all snuggle together.

Oddly, this nice, modern hotel had no power available near the head of the bed so I had to connect my CPAP to the wall on the other side of the room and we had to reverse the direction in which we slept for it to all work.

A slow Tuesday on the “farm” in Baita.  It was cooler and overcast today, but nice.  We did not open the windows today, though.  This might be our first full day at home with the doors and windows closed.

Did a bit of posting and writing today.  Liesl did school.  Dominica discovered today that Netflix Romania has Full House available which we are quite excited because we think that Liesl is really going to like it.  Although we always say that and the reality is is that our girls have never gotten into most American shows the way that we expect them to.  They just don’t have any experience with traditional television and they do not find the shows to be that interesting.

This afternoon just two of the village girls came over and spent a few hours playing with Liesl.  They stayed from probably two or three until after six.

This evening Dominica made lasagne for dinner, which was awesome.  It was late when it was ready to eat and we felt like relaxing.  So we fired up Netflix and watched That 70s Show while we had dinner.  Luciana came in from time to time to snuggle and watch it with us but mostly she and Liesl had some quiet time on their own in the kitchen.

Dominica ended up falling asleep around eleven.  I was tired too, but I always have to stay awake to get the girls off to bed.

Luciana ended up having a temper tantrum about watching videos and so lost them for the night.  This ended up having the benefit that she was in bed and asleep before midnight.  Liesl did not want to be awake alone so turned in voluntarily at a quarter past midnight and was asleep almost instantly.  She had seen too many millipedes and since Luciana was long asleep and likely going to sleep longer than her anyway I said that Liesl could sleep in our room which helped get everyone off to sleep very early.

We got up around eight and had to get everyone moving so that we could make it to breakfast as the girls always take forever to get moving in the morning.  We made it down around nine thirty and just sat inside at the cafe because it was a little damp and chilly to be outside as it rained last night and it is still in a bit of a drizzly state.

We had a very nice breakfast, I really like all of the food at the Hotel Diafan.  We have really enjoyed our stay here.

We returned to the room and got everything packed up, checked out and loaded up the car.  The hotel let us keep the car in their locked parking lot for a while so that we could take a little bit of time to see the square.

I took the family over to the biserica square just off of the square that we were staying on so that they could see the awesome archaeological display that I had discovered last night while I was out on my walk.  It was a very small thing to do this morning but a good use of the time before we had to get in the car and get moving.  And it gave the girls a little bit of time to run around and expend some energy before needing to sit in the car for several hours.  Dominica enjoyed the small exhibit and agreed that it was all very well done.

We returned to the main square and grabbed some treats from Millennium Chocolate for the girls to have with their motion sickness medicine.  Then we let them play for half an hour at least just running around on the pedestrian square as it was mostly empty of people.  Hopefully they will manage to get some sleep in the car as it is at least three hours back to Baita.

It was closer to one when we got into the Ford Focus and worked our way out of Baia Mare, which involved a little bit of getting turned around as always, and hit the road back south.

We had overcast skies but little to no rain on the drive.  It was nice to get to see everything in daylight that we went through in the darkness a few nights ago.

The drive was not bad and was not as long as going from Dallas to Houston.  So for Americans, a short drive.

Around four we got back to our village of Baita.  It was a long weekend away so I was set up right away and busy at writing and posting.  It remained cooler and very overcast all day and since almost no one saw us drive into town no kids came over today.  We had the afternoon to ourselves.

I went over to the farm next door in the evening to buy a fresh supply of milk.  This is my first time venturing out to get milk on my own.  The language gap there is very large and is always a big challenge.  But I successfully got two litres of milk.

We had a quiet evening with me spending most of my time trying to catch up from having been away for part of the weekend.

Today we woke up in Baia Mare, the capital of the northern county of Maremures which is grouped with Transylvania for administration purposes but is actually not a part of Transylvania proper.  For those in America, Baia Mare is, as a city, about the size of Syracuse, New York.

We are staying in Room 101, the apartment, at the Hotel Diafan right on the main square of the city.  It was a cloudy day that looked like rain when we woke up.  The mountains outside of the city had thick clouds pouring over them.

Dominica and I had breakfast at the hotel, delicious cheese and mushroom omelets and coffee.  We are impressed with the food and the service and hope that we can do dinner here at the hotel this evening.

After breakfast we gathered the kids, loaded up the car and drove to the east out of the city to head from Baia Mara out into the country to explore the famous UNESCO Wooden Church sites.  The drive east to the first city went surprisingly quickly.  I figured, based on the driving last night, that we would be on the road for a  while but we actually turned off early and were headed south on the small roads into the country in almost no time.

The drive around northern Romania, out in the country around Maremures, was really pretty.  Quaint villages, misty mountains, cute architecture.  We enjoyed just the drive itself quite a bit.  This is a very nice area and quite different from the area that we are living in around Baita.

We made several wrong turns and explored the back country lanes behind many a little town.  We found one church, basically by accident, that turned out to be one of the old wooden churches that had been damaged, as wooden churches are wont to be, and was the old wooden steeple and roof raised up and put on top of a modern stone building and in use for this morning’s service.  It was a neat find and not an UNESCO listed church and not even one of the ones that Wikipedia lists.  Apparently this region is just loaded with them if you know where to look.

It did not take us too long to find the first of the villages with the wooden church, although getting to the church itself was a bit confusing and although these are UNESCO sites they are not at all well labeled and it seems obvious that they are not large tourist attractions.  We got to the biggest of all of them and the parking lot for it could only take a dozen cars at most.  We were the only people here, today.  It was a gorgeous site, though.  We parked and walked up a nicely managed little area to the church itself and took a lot of pictures.  The church is locked up but you are really only there to see the outside of it, anyway.

We probably put in about half an hour at the first site.  It was very nice.  These churches were built by the Romanians here hundreds of years ago during the Hungarian occupation when building stone defensible structures was forbidden, probably for military reasons, so the locals who traditionally did all of the work in stone, turned to wood and made these really ornate and historically important churches to celebrate their religion in a way that was allowed for them.  The dark wood has stood up well to the centuries and would remind you of the famous Norse churches.  They really fit neatly into the misty countryside up here, too.
There was a meadow down below the church and I went down there to take pictures and noticed a barely visible, rock outlined path going through a big meadow and off towards another village.  In the distance, in the mist, I could see the next of these churches.  There must be a walking trail that connects there.  Very cool, indeed.  It was too far to walk with the kids, or with Dominica, so we used the car to drive to the next village to see that one.

At the next village, the church was in use when we arrived.  These are real churches, of course, and some of them are actively used for church services and it is Sunday morning, after all.  We arrived at this one right at one o’clock and people were staring to come out.  So we sat in the car until nearly everyone left.  Dominica and the girls decided that they wanted to stay in the car and just see it from there.  So only I got out and walked around the grounds and took pictures and got up close to the structure.  It, like the first, was quite impressive.

One of the things that is interesting about these churches is that many of them have ridiculously large steeples.  The churches themselves are not large at all.  They are actually quite small.  This one, on its back wall, got so narrow that it was no wider than the span of my arms finger tip to finger tip.  But the steeple is both massively wide and tall going many times the height of the church itself.  Very interesting design.

These two are the two churches that are closest together.  Getting to these was easy and I am pretty sure that these are the two that are the most visited.  Likely by a huge margin.  The drive to get to these was pretty easy as well.  It is up in the hills but not hard driving for me to do as the driver and not too bad even for Dominica and the girls who easily get motion sickness from the car.  These part was easy.

Going on towards the next village took us from an easy drive into big mountain roads and a lot of twists and turns.  The driving got hard, nothing terrible but a lot of work, and it really started to bother Dominica.  It was really cool, though, because we got into the core of the famous “peasant landscapes” that people talk about.  We found the world of roaming sheep, big old hay stacks, no cars and nothing has changed for hundreds of years.  This is a region where nothing has changed in forever, things are as they always have been, but with cars driving through from time to time.  It is a gorgeous region, partially because the sheep graze it all over so it looks like a golf course going on for miles.

We stopped and found the third of our wooden church towns.  This one had the church right on a main road so it was very easy to find.  It also had a bus load of Romanian school kids, probably around fifth to seventh grade levels, all over it.  So it was a quick stop as the kids were everywhere and, as you would expect, they had very little interest in the church itself.  It made it hard to take pictures because at least one of the boys intentionally moved in front of you if you tried to take any pictures and in general kids were lounging everywhere at the site just waiting until they could get back on the bus to leave.

We continued along our loop to find the little village of Breb.  This is the home of the family who wrote Somewhere Different which Dominica loved reading and, coincidentally, I completed reading on this very day.  It is a little village past the churches, but on the loop of them, high up in the mountains in the midst of the peasant farming region.  It is an incredibly picturesque spot.  Dominica had tried to get a reservation for this weekend at their hotel that is located in Breb but they had no rooms available for this weekend which is why we ended up staying in Baia Mare instead.

We got to Breb and managed to track down the Village Hotel.  There were several pensiune in town but to get to the hotel we had to drive through town and up a gravel road that, Dominica always the worrier, thought that the car could not make it up.  But the drive was fine and we managed to find the hotel which is not a hotel in the traditional sense but really a collection of out buildings as part of their theme is to let you stay in a real, traditional Romanian peasant home.  So they have three actual peasant cottages like you see around the landscape.

We were hungry for lunch and were hoping that with the name hotel they would be able to accommodate as the word hotel implies a restaurant in Europe (and really, just about anywhere, even in the US.)  The place, however, was closed up and empty.  They said on their website that they were open year round but there were no guests and no reception or anything so we are guessing that they are still closed for the season.  It seems unlikely that they are out of business as Dominica saw the ability to make reservations later in the year.  So they just were not open now.  There was no restaurant there so we figured that we would not have been able to have eaten anyway.  We took a few quick pictures to prove that we had been there and we left.

We tried the big, new pensiune in the middle of town which looked really nice but found that they only did breakfast and dinner and could not do lunch (so they cannot offer a full pension there, only a half pension, which is a bit odd.)  Not easy to do things in this neck of the woods.

Dominica looked at the map and decided that the loop ahead of us was going to be far too many mountains and winding roads for her.  The road to get where we were now was bad enough and she was not looking forward to returning that way but the road ahead looked even worse.  So instead of seeing the fourth church we turned around at Breb and took the path back the way that we had come which went very quickly as we were not stopping in every town trying to locate an out of the way historic wooden church.

We looked for lunch options along the route back but really there was nothing.  One of the things that we have already learned about Romania is that small town restaurants are a rarity.  Stopping casually just anywhere to grab a bit to eat in the middle of the day is much harder than one could guess.  It just is not a thing that people do.  Maybe as the tourist industry develops and the country enjoys greater prosperity it will start to creep into the culture.  In most of Europe you can eat just anywhere, just like in the States.

We ended up just driving all of the way back to Baia Mare, parking the car at the hotel and eating in town.  We had wanted to eat dinner at our hotel anyway, so we just went for a very early dinner.  We asked if we could eat outside at the outdoor cafe on the piata rather than upstairs in the restaurant proper and they said of course.  The upstairs restaurant is very fancy and right next to our hotel room and has great views of the piata but being outside on a gorgeous afternoon with fresh air is much better, especially with the girls.

Dinner outside was really amazing.  Dominica and I were both very impressed with our meals.  I got a Hungarian fish and dumplings meal that I loved.  It was two fried fillets of fish, covered under a mound of sauteed vegetables and the dumplings were something akin to a potato based pasta with cheese like German spatzel and dill.  Luciana tried my dumplings and proceeded to eat a large portion of it as it was basically mac and cheese and she said that it was one of her favourite foods, ever.  Dominica had a really good salad with cod on it that she really liked as well.  We are loving the Hotel Diafan. If we return to Baia Mare we will certainly stay here again.  The location is just perfect and the hotel setup is just right for us.

While Dominica and I finished our dinner the girls got up and ran around the piata playing tag.  One of the many benefits of sitting outside.  This gave them some time to stretch their legs and burn off some of the energy that they have stored up while riding in the car last night and today and seeing wooden churches which does not excite them very much.  They had a nice time and we enjoyed getting to just sit in the cafe while they wore themselves out.

I asked at the desk where we could find a playground and the front desk said that there was a big municipal park right across the bridge from where we were, so ten minutes on foot was all.  That would be perfect.  We have been looking for a playground for the girls and that would be a great way to wind down for the evening.

We walked and found a massive park with a huge mall and all kinds of things including a massive ethnographic museum there.  The playground was at the far side of the park so even though the walk to the park was fast the walk through it took some time.  The playground was really meant more for older kids and really little ones, an odd mix.  There were some obstacle course things like what I had as a kid at the Genesee County Park and neat rubber coated hills that we think might have been for skateboards or something.  There were no swings.  There was a slide for very little kids and a few other things.  And a broken trampoline that was very dangerous.

We stayed for probably an hour and the girls had a nice time.  Dominica and I sat on one of the rubber hills and relaxed for a bit.  The girls wanted us to constantly help them with one of the big kid activities after another, though.  They did have fun and they did get some exercise so we were pretty happy with coming out.  There were a lot of people in the park, more than we would have guessed.  Tons of people just out for a stroll or skateboarding on the mall.

We left and walked back to the hotel and went around the piata.  We found a chocolate store that also had gelato so we stopped there.  Dominica, Liesl and I got gelato and Luciana got some chocolates.  This is a good combination store for us since Luciana does not like ice cream.  The gelato was quite good.

It was nearly dark so we turned in.  The girls wanted downtime to just relax and use their Kindle Fires and play with their toys.  Dominica was tired and done walking.  I got everyone settled and then set off for a bit of a walk on my own.

I went to the piata and since I did not have a good idea of how to get around the city so I radiated out from the piata in a star pattern only going in straight lines off of the square so that it was always easy to come right back to the centre.  I discovered some nice areas and that there was an amazing piata one block away from ours with the big church for the city along with a really neat archaeological site underneath the old church that they have made a really nice display of.   I will be bringing the family over here tomorrow.

Altogether I did about ten kilometres of walking on my own this evening after dropping off the family at the hotel.  It was a nice walk and gave me a good feel for the city.  It’s a nice town, I like it here.

Back to the hotel it was time for a  shower and then off to bed.  Tomorrow we are going to do breakfast here in town, walk a small amount and see the area directly around the piata and then get in the car and drive back down to Baita.  Our goal is to be on the road and out of Baia Mare no later than one in the afternoon.  If we make good time driving in the daylight then we should be comfortably back to our village in around three hours getting us there at four in the afternoon.  Tomorrow is a Monday so I want to be back in the mid-afternoon so that I can get my writing and posting and stuff done as usual.

This has been a nice trip and we are glad that we got a chance to see Baia Mare and Maremures County.