Danube Cruise and Exploration 2017 -- Day 2

Sunday, August 13

Bucharest, Romania

With contributions from Yoyi

Breakfast at our hotel in Bucharest

Breakfast at the hotel was amazing. All kinds of bread, a large variety of fresh fruit, yogurt and scrambled eggs, omelettes, cheeses, almost as good a breakfast as we had in Israel.

We signed up for the full day tour to go to the Peleś palace and then on to the Bram castle, the so-called Dracula castle. Dracula was out for the day, so we enjoyed his home free of any blood-letting. Gorgeous places and the weather was perfect.

On the way out of the city we passed a field with an array of huge towers with wire grids connecting them.  This construct was used as a radio jammer during the communist era.  It cut off Bucharest and the eastern portion of the country by interfering with any broadcasts from the West.

The monkey wrench in the works today was that we are in the middle of a religious holiday weekend and everybody in Bucharest decided to take a vacation into the Carpathian mountains where these two attractions are located.  Today and the whole weekend is a national holiday commemorating something about the Virgin Mary. Yoyi thinks that Dracula was probably at church. But, in any case, the roads were packed. We got to see the beautiful countryside in very detail. We examined every leaf of every tree that we were stopped next to. Our driver and tour guide were excellent and they never lost their cool.

Peles Palace in Roumania

The first traffic jam was on the main highway, and it took us about an hour and a half to go perhaps 5 km. From there until the turn off to the little town of Bram the traffic was stop and go but at least we made some headway.

The traffic low point of the day was the worst traffic jam that I've ever experienced in my life. It took us about two hours to go no more than about 1 1/2 km. A woman carrying her child passed us, walking, and made the kilometer way before we did.

The Peles palace was built by one of the Romanian kings, around the beginning of the 20th century or the end of the 19th century. It's obscenely opulent given the poverty of the country. This site is still owned by the Romanian royal family, which lives in exile.

The castle in the little town of Bram is called Dracula's castle for absolutely no reason whatsoever.  Built in the last quarter of the 14th century, the well-preserved castle is still in the possession of an heir to the Romanian throne.  When you have seen some medieval castles, they become difficult to distinguish from one another.

On the way to Vlad's castle in Roumania

Because of the horrible traffic we arrived at the castle past closing time, but they allowed us to take our tour through the castle. Afterwards, we had a buffet dinner at the inn at the foot of the hill on which the castle stands. This is the meal we were supposed to have had for lunch on the assumption that we would arrive at the castle somewhere around 1 o'clock.  Once we had eaten the delicious lunch for dinner, each of us was handed a bag full of food that was supposed to have been our box dinner to eat on the bus back to Bucharest.

There was a thunder storm, a real downpour, that started just as we began dinner. The deluge stopped only a few minutes after we were finished with dinner after we had gone to the trouble of worrying how to get back to the bus without getting wet. Yoyi had cut holes in a paper bag so that she could put it over her head and still see were she was going.

While there was still considerable traffic on the way back to Budapest including some traffic jams, we made it back without further incident. We arrived back at the hotel at 1:30 in the morning instead of 7:30 in the evening.  Our butts ached after so much time in the bus.

Sleeping was not easy after such a long ordeal over the day.