In search of Vlad the Impaler

Well here we are in Cluj, Romania on a dark and stormy night. Just to bring the blog up to date we left Budapest about 10:30 on Saturday morning. The rental car pick-up went smoothly and Hertz even gave us an upgrade to the Suzuki 5-4, an amazing 3 inches longer than the standard Hertz Suzuki. I have no clue how much it is costing as the original quote from Hertz was in US dollars, the contract is in Euros and the deposit receipt is in Forints.

We had a nice drive across Hungary and only experienced a 20 minute delay crossing into Romania. The border looked like a toll booth on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, 10 lanes wide, 5 entering and 5 leaving, all but 4 were closed and 2 Romanian and 2 Hungarian agents working as fast as they could. The uniformed officer said, "you do realize you are going to Romania." I said I was aware of where I was headed and told him I was looking forward to the visit.

We stopped for a while in Oradea for refreshment and headed on to Cluj, our Saturday night destination. Andrea had arranged a couple of funny little hotel rooms for us near the center of Cluj and we arrived around 10 pm. Romania is in a different time zone that Hungary, in several ways, so we are now 8 hours ahead of Chicago.

Free WiFi here at the pink hotel, room 108.

Today we explored the area around Cluj. It is not a small town, very urban but very old. Great churches and a beautiful opera house.

I've been watching for angry, pitchfork yielding mobs and thus far have been a little disappointed. I've seen lots of village people with pitchforks, this seems to be hay season and they build these giant stacks of hay. No mobs, it was Sunday, maybe a union thing. We saw a lot of horses working in the fields and pulling carts along the road. Cattle we being driven along the road to milking houses and several large flocks of sheep. Eva saw some chickens.

The pictures will have to do the talking tonight.

Tomorrow we go to a castle.

Enjoy