Driving to Bulgaria - Day 3 - Romania

So, Austria looked a lot like Germany. Hungary, less so. But as soon as we hit the Romanian border on the morning of our third day of driving, we knew we were in a very different world.

This phone booth was the first thing we saw after crossing the border. On careful inspection you may notice that the phone has been removed. This is certainly not the first time I've seen a phone booth with the phone ripped out, but it was a bit surprising to see that directly across from the border police station.

Here is the border police building opposite the phone booth. Note also the sketchy Italian guy--one of several bringing Italian cars of questionable origin across the border. They passed through quickly, while we waited close to an hour in the sweltering sun for the border cops to check our car papers.

The villages in Romania were quite colorful. I liked the tiled effect on this house we passed.

Bigger towns had residences more like this.

We got a kick out of this branch of Banca Transilvania.

It was right about this point that we learned the main highway was closed. A look at our map showed only very small lines as alternatives. Hmm.

The smaller roads had about as many horse-drawn carts as automobiles.

The drivers of this cart stopped at a bottleneck to check something out. Cars and carts backed up several deep on either side.

Here's another one, about to be passed by a police car. We didn't get a photo of my favorite cart-related sighting, however: a guy sitting on top of cart full of dried grass, piled at least twice as high as the one in this picture--and lighting a cigarette!

We saw a lot of people working in the fields, sans tractors or other modern equipment. I don't think I had ever seen hay bales made without some kind of machine. With a support structure made of sticks, they have a kind of Blair-Witch quality.

The most absolutely old-world part of the drive was right here, where the "highway" was actually made of cobblestones. Throughout the drive, I was quite stressed out, threading my way between horse-drawn carts, trucks with poorly-secured cargo, and potholes the size of a Volkswagen. Furthermore, we were not even sure where we were; our map was not completely accurate, and we were completely off the map of our TomTom "navi" (borrowed from the Max Planck Institute)--the screen just showed a car driving in the middle of empty, apparently roadless space.

In the back seat, however, Gwen Wren was quite wonderfully chilled and self-entertaining (or receptive to Rachel's creative distractions).

She read her book about Percival the Plain Little Caterpillar--I think the story is easy enough to follow even upside-down. I bet some of you can even guess the ending.... (Hint: on the last page, Percival is no longer Plain.)

She tried wearing her starfish as a hat.

She tried wearing an old ricotta cheese container as a hat.

Perhaps the most effective entertainment tool was the mirror Grandma Taisie sent us.

And here the photo stream dries up, so I will jump to the conclusion. Around 1 AM, 16 hours after starting out in Hungary, about 2.5 days after leaving home in Germany, we finally arrived at the research station in Tabachka. We found a houseful of friendly bat researchers and a meal of tasty Bulgarian food waiting for us. Mango and Stefan escorted us down to Leyla Stevka's house--she too had stayed up to greet us. Finally, by 3 AM, we were snugly in bed and well on our way to adjusting to the nocturnal schedule of bat research.