Saturday, Oct 14, Bran Stoker Castle

Today we arise in the Radisson Blu in Bucharest. Breakfast is included so we indulge and it is a huge feast! Right on time at 9 AM, our driver, Maurius, arrives in a small van. We load up and he drives away. We inquire as to how many others will be joining us and he informs us this is a private tour for just the two of us! We look at each other and our eyebrows raise as we smile at each other!

So off we go on the beginning of a several hour drive. The worst part of our day again, the drive. But Maurius lets me ride up front and there are actually things to take photos of so my camera isn’t complaining! We leave Bucharest and drive into Saftica. The countryside slips by as we progress and Maurius is conversive if not the greatest English speaker. We ask questions about his life and customs and he does his best to answer.

Eventually, we run into stopped traffic which he explains is normal for the weekends. We are surprised for our heaviest traffic is during the weekdays! But after sitting in stop and go traffic for well over an hour, we come across the reason, it is a traffic cop directing traffic! Same as at home! Something interesting is vegetable and flower stands all along the road.

It rained last night and the thing I notice most is the fall foliage! It seems the overnight rain has transformed the trees into full blown fall foliage! Another fun item is how it is very common to see the road painted bright red at crosswalks!

We arrive in the town of Sinaia, where Peles Castle is and Maurius gives us a private tour of the castle! The attention to detail in the architecture and wood interior is stunning! We learn that they completed all of this in 3 short years! One can only imagine the workforce necessary to do that!

The grounds are also stunning and we thoroughly enjoy our visit!

The castle is quite clearly a wedding venue. I can only wonder what it costs to have your wedding here! So I added a few bride photos to my collection, LOL Add to that photos of photographers doing what they do best!

I ask Maurius if lunch is next as it is after 2PM. He tells us that we need to arrive at Bran Stoker’s Castle prior to 4PM or we can’t enter. And since this place is slated to be one of our highlights of the entire trip, we understand what he’s telling us. So we settle for a slice of pizza each to go and a bottle of water each and we eat on the road with Maurius permission. It is more than an hour to Bran Stoker Castle and we get to the ticket booth at 3:50PM. We made it! Once in, we have all the time we want to explore the Castle! In the town (city?) of Brasov, Judetul Brasov! (Welcome to Brasov!)

We get excited as we get closer to the Castle, lovingly referred to as Dracula’s Castle. It’s not, of course, but hey, it helps the tourist trade, right?

Maurius gives us another private tour of this Castle and he is quite knowledgeable of everything! It turns out this is where he lives! We were more impressed with Peles Castle than we are with Bran Stoker Castle and it turns out that most of the Castle has been recreated from the original. We think we have tickets to the dungeons and torture equipment, but alas, Maurius got the wrong tickets for us. It will take a trip down all the stairs to fix the tickets and then a trip back up, just to go down into the dungeons. Seems a bit much, and we do get to step into the top of the torture chambers before we are asked to leave.

So we don’t opt to get into the torture chambers but the castle is amazing in it’s own right. Our ticket are good for the elevators down to the gardens and that is where we go! We even catch the sunset on the Castle and we are good to go! Maurius shows us where the souvenirs are sold and we pick up a few things for family and friends!

Maurius takes us to our AirBnB in the town of Rasov and we check in. Maurius carries our luggage up the steep steps and all is good! Our hosts tell us of a few restaurants and we choose a close one and have Italian food cooked in the Romanian way! Getting back to our room and we are done for the night!

See you tomorrow!

Friday the 13th, October

Today we get up early and put our bags out. They are collected while we go to breakfast. We even are able to snag the front seat in the bus again! Today it is a 3 hour bus ride to Bucharest. It was supposed to have been an hour and a half but because the ship cannot navigate the shallow waters, we cannot make it to the port of choice.

So off we go along regular roads. There appears to be no highways to aid us in our travels today. With one ‘comfort stop’ at a gas station (some comfort!) we finally arrive in Bucharest. The tour guide today has a very loud voice and his bus microphone seems to be turned up to the maximum. He is very chatty and compares and contrasts the pros and cons of communism versus democracy for hours. Trying to nap is a useless endeavor. I also have to snap a photo of a smiling Brazilian photographer that I met on the ship!

He then takes us to the Palace for a tour even though it is already past noon and we are getting hungry. The Palace tour takes an hour and a half and is conducted by a Gestapo type lady tour guide that is very gruff. Interesting info though as she takes us through many rooms of the Palace and describes the life and times of the communist rulers. It is mentioned many times how the concept of communism makes everyone equal. But the ruling class is a bit ‘more equal’ than everyone else, if you get my drift.

But now many of us are becoming Hangry for it is now well past 2 PM and our tummies are screaming for relief! We are finally taken to a restaurant area and it is after 3 PM when we get seated and served. We do find a Romanian dish called, “Mici” (pronounced mee-chi) that is a sausage dish and is excellent! A couple bottles of water to quench our thirst and a couple glasses of wine and we are good to go!

Back on the bus, we are taken to our hotel, the Radisson Blu, and we check in. We discovered earlier that Elee accidentally left her camera batteries and charger on the ship. Bummer. But we find a big camera store and hire a taxi to take us there. Unfortunately, her batteries were not in stock. So it looks like she will be relegated to her cell phone camera for the remainder of the trip. That makes 2 disabled cameras because the battery charger for my small camera quit working on day one. So I got about 2 days of batteries before they drained!

We make it back to the hotel in time to join the Welcome Cocktail Hour and we visit with shipmates and share where we are all going from here! Then we head off to the pool deck and have a bowl of chili and a salad before retiring to the room for the night.

See you all tomorrow!

Thursday, Oct 12, 2023

Today we wake and have breakfast. I dish out a classic English Breakfast! We have signed up for the all day tour today. We don’t know what that entails. But like the troopers we are, we board the bus before 9AM and are lucky enough to get the front seat again! It turns out that we have in excess of a two hour ride to our destination! So that will be over 4 hours both ways to make up over half of our eight hour tour.

We are visiting Veliko Tarnovo, a very old town in Bulgaria. This town is famous for it’s beer brewery and it’s views overlooking the river and a castle. We also visit an old church where Chanters perform for us inside the acoustic interior. It is mesmerizing for sure!

Then we have lunch in a local hotel but it leaves us wanting better. The food is bland and overcooked. Well, I guess you can’t get it right all of the time! We wander along a cobblestone street and Elee even finds her obligatory hand painted painting to bring home!

The sign did say to take a selfie! So here you go!

Then, alas, it is time to depart for the 2 hour ride back to the ship. We arrive in time for the evening review of tomorrow’s activities and dinner. Then it is off to our stateroom to pack for we have to put our luggage out by 7 AM. It doesn’t take long and I even find time to go up to the lounge and see one more show put on by our Activities Director, Noel. He is a very talented performer and everyone is entertained!

Well it’s off to bed for us! See you tomorrow!

Wed, Oct 11 Vidin Bulgaria

We wake today in Bulgaria. We are being told the ship might not be able to get to Bucharest because of water levels. But we still carry on. Breakfast over, we board the buses for today’s excursion. We tour an old fortress in Vidin and it’s somewhat scenic. Fun stuff touring around ancient ruins.

We visit the Albutin Rock Monastery and see some strange headstones. Reading the descriptive sign doesn’t shed much light on what we are seeing!

Then it’s off to Dos Alamos Winery in the Danube Plains for a fun Wine Tasting and vineyard tour. The Owner takes to me when I tell him I am a small winemaker. We join his wine room tour and the barrels in the room are to be envied. Hundreds of barrels! During the wine tour and tasting, he gives us a “Barrel Tasting” of his “Gamza” wine, which is a new grape for us and a very tasty wine! So I buy a bottle to bring home! It turns out to be not nearly as good as the Barrel Taste!

Then it is back on board the ship for the rest of the day. The ship leaves the docks and we cruise on down the river. Several sights confront our cameras and we oblige them. Even see a River Dredge in action!

After dinner there is a show in the lounge where passengers get to express their dancing talents! We join them for several songs and all are happy!

So goodnight it is! See you tomorrow!

Tuesday, Oct 10 Milanovac & the Iron Gate

Up at 7AM today to have breakfast and be on the buses by 9AM. We cruised by some castle this morning at 6AM coming in. Turns out the castle is right next to us when we step off the ship. We are in Golubac, Serbia. This is what they call a ‘Technical Stop’ as we get off the ship and the ship will move on as we take our bus and walking tour today.

We board the buses and travel along the Danube. It is raining lightly but enough to obscure the vision of most things. We arrive at Lepenski Vir, an archaeological site where the oldest community on earth is documented. Not that it is the oldest, but the oldest ‘community’ ever found! They have built a museum roof over the site and you can walk around and see what the insides of the houses looked like. Outside they have a couple complete grass huts that show what the completed homes looked like. All in all a fun excursion!

Then it’s back on the buses where they take us to our ship which is now docked in Donji Milanovac and we have lunch. We have to walk across a barge to get on the ship and I find I can walk up to our room from the outside and a couple fun photos are acquired! As soon as we clear Customs, we will cruise down the Danube through the Iron Gorge. This is a much more scenic part of the Danube with mountains and hills. The scenes are beautiful and our cameras are happy once again! We meet with shipboard friends and start up a game of Mexican Train Dominos. But partway through the game our ship reaches the dam and Iron Gate Locks and our cameras complain at us because we are not setting up to photograph a new set of ship’s locks in the world! We are bound by our cameras wishes and walk away from the game to step out on the front of the ship.

This set of ship’s locks are different from what we have ever seen before. There are two locks here. The first lock is very intriguing and we enter it. As the water recedes (we are descending in altitude) the lock gates are unusual. Once we drop to our intended water level, the gates split in the middle. The top gate rises and the bottom two thirds drops down and goes under water. The red light turns to green and our ship drives under pipes and a bridge. Interesting! Then we find ourselves in a second lock where we drop further and this time, swing gates (like the Panama Canal Gates) swing open and we power out into the Danube once again! All told, we drop 30 Meters, a fantastic drop! Even the Panama Canal doesn’t drop that much total! We drive out into the Danube again and power on.

It is time for dinner. We go back inside and get our daily briefing and then go to dinner. It seems we may have to divert from our planned itinerary due to river water levels. We are told of a barge that is stuck on a sandbar. So we await the morning announcement to hear where we will go.

We go to the lounge for a Cabaret Show performed by our Activity Director and it is entertaining. I do not bring my cameras and therefore do not photograph it. Now it is time for bed so we bid you adieu!