Castles, Cake, and Open Road

We got another slightly late start today, since the hotel blocked in our car with a line of other cars for which they didn't have keys. So after some yelling and a quick breakfast, and after the hotel tracked down all the owners of the other cars and made them come downstairs at 7:30 am to move them, we were on the road to Peles Castle in Sinaia. Along the way we saw a huge elk just hanging out in someone's front yard and also a fox (dead, but it still counts!). It's also very cold here in the morning, so the fields are covered in frost. Peles was the summer residence of the Romanian royal family and was built for King Carol I from 1866 to 1914; it was the first castle in Europe to have electricity and is also notable for having the family's original belongings (including a staggering amount of art, German stained glass, and huge Murano glass chandeliers).  I didn't take many pictures inside with my phone, since you had to pay per device, but we...

After a 14-hour sleep, we got up to drive to Brasov. (Side note: I've never been so exhausted from travel, and people who say they'll travel "when they're older" are full of crap. That almost killed me at 32.) Driving in Bucharest was more than mildly terrifying--if there aren't any parking spots available, people have no trouble just hopping up onto a sidewalk or even just parking in a lane of traffic. They also pay little to no attention to lines in the road, sides of the road, or street lights. It's kind of like real-life Mario Kart, if Mario had a Princess Peach in the car too shrieking every five seconds because she's certain they're going to die. It took us four hours to drive the 88 miles to Brasov, in stop-and-go traffic because there isn't a highway here--it's a two-lane road that eventually winds up into the mountains as you reach Transylvania. But the farther you drive the more beautiful it gets--huge mountains with changing ...

After a 17-hour travel day with a stop in Heathrow, we finally arrived in Bucharest...which, according to most reports, is a crumbling Communist hole. Though I like to make my own opinions about travel, those reports are right--the city looks like it just came out of a war, with run-down block apartments everywhere and then a very small old town with some of what Bucharest looked like pre-Communism remaining. The old town used to be much larger, until Romania's Communist dictator Ceaucescu decided it would be a great idea to blow up whole city blocks and replace them with block housing. Ceaucescu was the only Communist dictator removed by violent force when Communism fell, and he was one of the most (if not the most) brutal of the dictators, especially after he was inspired by a trip to North Korea to turn his entire country into a work camp. Happily, he didn't get too far with that plan before he and his wife were executed by firing squad. Because w...