Planning for Romania

In less than 100 days (96, to be exact) we will be on a plane to Romania where we will spend six weeks touring the country. While that still sounds like it's quite a long ways off, we've been spending some of our free time on the internet getting familiar with the country.

It always amazes me how many cities are out there that you've never heard of. I mean, everybody (I would assume) has heard of Bucharest, Romania. But you've probably never heard of the city of Cluj-Napoca, and yet is has a population of 300,000. Or Sibiu with 175,000 people.

We learned a very important lesson when we were in Czech Republic in 2012. While the capital city of Prague is interesting and worth a visit, there are many more interesting cities in the country that do not have the tourists or the tourist prices.

The city of Sibiu, Romania, with the Carpathian Mountains in the background.

And so, while we will be arriving and departing from Bucharest, we will only spend a couple of days there at the beginning. If we're interested in more, we'll do that before we leave. Otherwise, we will get out of the big city and explore the places nobody else goes to.

One of the first things we do for planning is to have a map handy. So we print out a copy for making notes on...

Print out a map found on the internet for making notes.

We'll probably do a lot of travel by local bus. But, we do also have plans to rent a car for a few days at a time. We want to explore a lot of the mountains and do some hiking and we've read how much easier it is by car. Car rentals aren't that expensive in Romania and we're going to be there during low season.

Of course you've all heard of the legends of Dracula and Transylvania. We'll be visiting Bran Castle, the home of the title character in the novel Dracula.

Then, simply going from village to village staying either with couchsurfing hosts or in small pensions and guesthouses. From  there, a circular route into the country of Moldova (the least visited country in Europe) and Transnistria on the the Moldova Ukraine border.

We're decided that there is enough to see in these two countries in six weeks that we likely won't be making a detour into Serbia or Bulgaria.

And so...the research continues. We can't wait to show you more of this interesting "off the beaten path" country!

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I don't even know what to say...

Goosh Pants