Category: travel

Very glad I split that journey up. Cycling all the way here would have truly been a nightmare.

Garmin tells me my body battery is low and my sleep quality is bad. The Transfagarasan Highway was a challenging ride. I would expect to take it relatively easy for the following few days. I guess sometimes you get tempted to push yourself too far.

Mountain roads

Well, more in the foothills really. After yesterday’s lorries blowing soot in my face, I decided to take a further route. A more hilly route, but a route with more nature and less traffic.

Stops were in little village café along the way. It was pretty charming really. Mountains and forests as a backdrop.

I’m limited by the number of photos I can take as the pixel’s camera has been rendered useless.

Each time I want to take a picture, I have to pull the tablet out of the pannier.

As you can imagine, this isn’t something I want to be doing very often.

I’ve taken two pictures, one with the the tablet, the other with the pixel. See if you can spot the difference.

Water inside the phone is not a good thing. Today, I expect more rain. Ive prepared by putting all my gear in bags. It won’t get wet. The tablet should be able to fend for itself, it’s got no cracks or damage as long as it doesn’t get submerged, it should be fine.

Continue reading “Cycling – Horezu to Targu Jiu”

Ok, so my Google phone is now broke and has some severe problems:

• Won’t charge. Unless you turn it off and fiddle with the USB.
• Has condensation in the lens’s. No more photos.
• SIM not recognised. It did this for a while. I suspect the moisture has moved onto the circuit board and is stopping it charging up.

Tried to take some photos yesterday. They didn’t turn out well. As you can see. Everything is covered in mist. Also, it doesn’t rotate the photos, I have to do that manually.

Trunk road cycling

Is no fun. You tend to be drawn into a world of dust, noise cars and trucks blasting past. You can’t really here yourself think.

Today, I’m going to take a longer route into the hills and away from the main road.

Also, rather than do an extra long day yesterday, I took the option of dividing the journey in two.

Last night, I stayed in the cute little town of Horezu.

Continue reading “Cycling – Curtea de Agnes to Horezu”

A day of mountains, rain and bears.

The Transfagarasan highway crosses the Carpathian Mountains. It’s not always open due to its susceptibility to weather conditions. In fact, it doesn’t usually open until July. Even when I went up, it only opened in both directions at 11am. Until then, the police would only let traffic through intermittently, and it was closed overnight. Obviously, they’ve had a lot of problems with loss of life here in the past.

As we know, and as I’ve said before, the weather changes quick in the mountains.

Rain

I can’t say I wasn’t expecting rain. Cycling up to my last homestay, I could see the clouds and hear the rumble of thunder from the clouds sitting atop the hills. That rumbling and the clouds rested where it was. Didn’t move onto the plains where I was cycling along.

Continue reading “Cycling – Transfagarasan Highway”

The easiest and most picturesque day of cycling so far.

Ascending for the first 20 miles out of Brasov, the rest was all down hill for almost 4 hours.

The wind was behind me as well. All very nice.

Had to stop at the supermarket to get dinner as the apartment in Cartisoara isn’t close to anywhere I can buy food.

Got a couple of beers, a pizza, some potato salad and a caramel cream dessert.

Continue reading “Cycling – Brasov to Cartisoara”

Thought I’d take a look in. It would be rude not to seeing as it’s only 20km down the road.

Bran Castle was set up as a tax haven between East and West what used to be Wallachia by tuotonic knights after the crusades.

It’s vantage point, geographical location and local features made it one of the key castles and the seat of Wallachian nobility.

Most of the walk thru is dedicated to the nobility and the history of the castle across the years. During the Soviet period, the castle fell into disrepair. Only in 2009 was it bought out and restored becoming what it is today, a tourist attraction.

Continue reading “Bran Castle, Transylvania, home of ‘Dracula’”