Four Cemetery Crosses
In the most northern part of Romania, literally just yards from the Ukraine boarder, lies the small village of Sapanta. This town has become a tourist attraction due to its unusual cemetery with hand carved, brightly painted blue crosses and witty rhymes about the deceased’s life, the Merry Cemetery. Sometimes there is an epitaph of what caused their death.
Courtyard Cat Sibiu, Romania
Sibiu, Romania is a charming maze of winding cobblestone streets, large open squares and fine restaurants. It was a very welcomed relief from the gritty streets of Bucharest. I had seen the above blue wall and cat scene photo posted by Vagabon and Dave sixty days earlier in their travel blog and instantly loved it. So I cruised from Texas to Spain, flew from Barcelona to Bucharest, rented a car to Sibiu just to see these beautiful blue tones….. Thank you Bonnie and Dave!
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Transfagarsan Highway, Fahrvergnügen
The Transfagarasan Highway was made famous by a British TV show which named it the world’s best highway for sports car enthusiasts. It obviously would be great fun in a sports car with the road blocked off for a race, as it was a few days after these photos. However, this was a very worrisome ride due to dodging fallen rocks and the aggressive Romanian drivers constantly passing on blind curves.
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Three Romanian Haystacks
Driving across the Romania countryside there are many haystacks in the wide open fields, people’s yards and even in the apple orchards. This is the winter food for the sheep, cattle and dairy cows. The plastic tarp on top is supposed to help protect the stack from rain and snow. However, they never seemed to be very large nor tied into place very well, so apparently this protection is optional.
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Bucharest People’s Palace
The Palace of Parliament or People’s House in Bucharest, Romania is the second largest building in the world, after the Pentagon. But the People’s House is barely occupied. Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena died of lead poisoning from a 1989 Christmas Day firing squad just before its completion, so they never got to live in this extravagant building.
Bucharest Barber Shop
Time for another haircut. I passed up a haircut in Barcelona opting for Bucharest instead as it sounded a bit more exotic to me. How could anyone in need of a haircut pass up a barber shop called Frize Bad?
Bucharest Elegance
The large Old Town section of Bucharest is packed with tourists, Romanians on ‘holiday’ and locals eating at the great restaurants. We could have conquered the trolley system, but after sitting around the apartment with our computers all morning making lodging reservations, we needed the exercise the three mile trip offered.
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Turrets on a Bucharest Orthodox church
We normally drive or take the train while traveling in Europe. However, European travel restrictions (Schengen Agreement) dictated we get out of Spain as well as twenty-five other European countries and head for a country not part of this agreement. We would be illegal aliens if we remained in Spain. So we boarded our first ever European flight from Barcelona to Bucharest.
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Park Guell Barcelona
We had visited Barcelona, what I call Gaudi Town, for a week about 90 days ago as the termination point to our trans-Atlantic cruise. Antoni Gaudi has four wonderful architectural master pieces in Barcelona, including Sagrada Familia which still being built 120 years later, Casa Milá and Casa Batlló. We will now get to see a fourth major work by Gaudi, Park Güell. We are concluding a 90 day, clockwise visit to the Iberian Peninsula.
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Pyrenees Sunset
Our visit to the beautiful Pyrenees Mountains along the boarder of Spain and France did not work out as we had hoped due to some unfortunate events. We were both very sick with the flu and our rental car got a flat tire.
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