More Car Trouble and Roadside Encounters

-

Jo: This morning we are fixing to leave our fabulous mountain retreat, when our Dacia Duster will not start up. It sounds like it wants to start but doesn’t. We try for about 30 minutes and then think of plan B, C and D. We are hours away from even the tiniest village, never mind a functional car mechanic. The car rental agency is Brasov is not responsive. Plan C and D involve large amounts of money towards a tow truck and mechanic to repair the car, as well as multiple days of waiting around. Plan B is what I do next: ask our friendly hotel host for help. He gets on the phone instantly, with what appears to be a car expert. The expert then talks our hotel host through a simple battery reset via video chat, which leads to the car starting promptly without complaints. We are beyond grateful and thank our man profusely. It can be imagined that the Romanian mountain folks are all fantastic Jack-of-all-trades due to scarcely of resources. We check the map afterwards and note that the closest mechanic truly is 70 miles of windy mountain roads away- phew! 

We also had our first encounters with brown bears along above mentioned windy mountain road. They seemed to be out looking for food and were walking along the same road we saw a lot of tourist walking down. I definitely had second thoughts about getting out of the car later! 







There are plenty of horse carriages in the Romanian country side, most carrying goods and people on their way to selling the goods by the roadside.

Not getting out of the car! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blast Off

-
 Ok y'all. This is it. The evening before we leave for our great Europe adventure. We are in a luxurious resort hotel in Colorado Springs, really preparing for roughing it in the eastern European mountains. We're practicing our beer-drinking skills and working on our tans, all key when you want to wrestle brown bears, wolves and probably vampires in Transylvania. Here is an initial post to get y'all hooked to reading our ramblings.  We have spent the last week road-tripping across the US from Tampa FL to Colorado Springs - our new home. The last few days we visited multiple Walmarts multiple times to buy anything from boot wax to head lamps. Now we are pretty convinced we are ready for six weeks of backpacking across Europe.  In typical Jo-and-Tosh-travel-manner we have planned this trip to the T: We are flying on a buddy pass/ standby (Thanks Rob! And Lil!) to Frankfurt, to head to Hamburg for a big family party. That's pretty much where the planning ends. We have a ro...
Read more

Piatra Craiului Hiking

-
Image
 Jo: We just finished our last 2-day hike in the southern Carpathian mountains close to Brasov. The mountain range is called Piatra Craiului and holds several high peaks in the 2500 m range and a long ragged ridge of spiky lime stone. This time I planned the hike and arranged an overnight stay at a mountain hut (cabana Curmatura) to break up the days. My hiking guides for the area describe the peak ascent as 'tough', 'alpine' but 'managable if in good condition with sure footing', it also recommends to avoid the ascend if afraid of heights. I compare the routes with our hikes in Slovakia and the Fagaras range and come to the conclusion that we can manage it, despite multiple steep sections with rope guides. We park our car at the trail head and make our way up a 1500 ft incline through the forest. Forest here is dense and lucious, reminding me of fantasy movies with fairies and trolls. Tut is in a relatively good hiking mood and only complains a few times, despi...
Read more

Istanbul!

-
Image
Update: We were allowed into Turkey, after all! Tosh:  Istanbul has been at the top of my travel list for a while; the city’s history as Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul is beyond fascinating to me. As we land, you can see the city spreading over the two continents, Europe and Asia, and understand why it’s such a strategically important place. After landing, we get introduced to Turkish bureaucracy when the officer turns Tut around for not having 180 days before her passport expires. We have to go back to another window to get a special visa. It’s a pretty entertaining charade of being sent from one station to the next, and we end up, literally, in a janitor’s closet (mops and all) with an officer sitting in a window who asks us to pay him $165 euro. We do, and surprisingly, it works to get us through customs.  I’ve booked a two day tour. We’ve only got a short time here; so, I wanted someone to help us navigate around town efficiently. We wake the next morning, and Barish, o...
Read more