After spending a night in Brasov, our next stop was in a very different part of the country--in Cartisoara.
We spent two nights at this wonderful cottage in the middle of rural Romania. It was probably our favorite place of the whole trip. We made sure we had extra relaxing time while here to do our laundry, to play games and run around outside. We picked up some pizza and even a Fanta and chilled in the gazebo. It was magical.
This is the entrance to our cottage that had a really cool upstairs. Katya slept downstairs and we had two big beds upstairs. The kids played games, walked over to the stream right next to the house, hung out in the hammock and we did some laundry!
The house was located in a very convenient location to start our drive on the Transfagarasan road. It was a route that Katya had heard so much about but one that the missionaries were not allowed to ever take. This road is so windy that it is closed for most of the year. Hair pin turns and tunnels, bears and lots of beautiful scenery-that's what we had in store.
We started our drive SUPER early as we wanted to beat the traffic. IT WORKED!
We had read about crawling lines of cars and did not want this drive to turn into a five hour ordeal.
Most of the road is not really crazy, but there is a famous passage that literally is like a cartoon race track, so windy....
Honestly, after Ireland and some insane British roads this was not too terrible, even with a manual car.
We saw a beautiful lake, Balea Lake, at around 2000 m of altitude, but can't even prove that because I couldn't find any pictures!
Also, the road is called Transfagarasan because Fagaras is the name of the mountain range right here in the Carpathian mountains. So Trans Fagaras means basically across the Fagaras mountains...not Transfiguration or anything, like I originally thought-hahaha.
Oh yes...and we saw the bears. The bears were not even scared of people at this point.
Just walking across the road. Cars would stop and stare at them, but they didn't care. They said to not feed them...so we didn't...and kept our windows rolled up.
They do have a bit of a problem with bears in Romania actually. Most of them don't attack people but they have had instances of bad endings when a bear encountered hikers.
So the famous Transfiguration road turned out to be pretty cool AND suprisingly not so crowded after all. We were finished with our drive by half day because we started early and that worked out great!
In the evening, we went to a highly rated restaurant in a neighboring village, still pretty in the middle of nowhere. It was a little hard to find as we had to follow some interesting signs and directions. But finally we found it! Here is a picture of the village street as we drove to our dinner place.
The restaurant was popular because it was more like a local farm restaurant with fresh fish and produce. The atmosphere was very casual. It seemed it was like a place to stay and also a place to eat. We chose to eat outside and picked a table. As we were waiting to order, one of the women at a table a few rows away from us started to choke and a guy with her started the Heimlich maneuver! It was a bit crazy as she was "loudly" choking and it was pretty scary. Robert got up to start walking to help, although the guy was already doing things right. But suddenly the lady spit out a huge chunk of meat. And she was okay and everyone sat down like nothing even happened.
It was so unpleasant and actually disgusting that I had a hard time even thinking about food. We got up and moved to a different part of the outside seating area just to get our minds of the experience. For some reason, it really bothered me (and it bothered me that other people didn't like jump up to help or something). Even right now as I am recalling that experience, I am feeling unsettled inside;).
After dinner we walked around the beautiful fishing ponds where people could come and try their luck in fishing. And no one else was thinking about the lady choking besides me probably-hahaha. Goodness...
Well, let's not finish on that. We had a short drive ahead of us the following morning! To our last Romanian stop--Oradea!
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