Got up, breakfast and headed out by 0815. The first stop was a really unique fortress. This fortress was. ‘Working’ fortress in that it was a town Inside the fortress walls! A population of about 1000 with houses businesses, restaurants, etc. Granted the primary. Business was tourism. We climbed the obligatory tower to view the surrounding city. There is a Lutheran church, the fortress and a high school. Anyone can attend the high school from the city or the fortress. This was, in large part, build by Germans from the 1700s?
Verdi was also the birthplace of Vlah Dracu! And it was here that his son, Dracula, was born.
The trip was about 1.5 hours from where we were yesterday. We ate lunch here and then headed to our final stop …… About 2 hours away. This was simply a city that had done an amazing amount of redo in the plaza area. It was by far the best, most well up kept city plaza we have seen. Very modern looking and freshly redone and painted. It was here we walked ‘The Bridge of the Liar’. The city was built in the 13-1400s and across one of the roads coming into town was this bridge. If one made a statement on the bridge and if you lied you were thrown off the bridge – don’t worry it was not that high so probably a broken bone or two. We did not climb the city tower as it was closed for an hour and as we have many towers – we headed out.
This was the end of the two days so we headed for Bucharest and the hotel. This took about 4 hours. A lot of the trip was In The mountains with serious traffic. One place we went was a mineral spring’s town and it was as bad as Gatlinburg is now – just crawled along. Most of the road paralleled a river. Romania gets most of its energy from hydro, the coal, o e nuclear plant, other Eco-sources. Along the river, we followed there were at least 5 hydro plants – not big ones. Throughout the trip it was really interesting looking at the countryside, the small villages. By and large the towns/villages were neat but not well to do as these are farming communities. The main crops we have seen are corn, wheat, sugar beets, barley, sunflowers (oil) and hops. These are their major crops. The whole of Transylvania was really green and beautiful countryside
Additional Information
Highlights:
See 8-July-2017
Photos: