Our second leg of the trip started out in Bucharest, Romania. First we went to the market and museum. Here, I bought some neat hand made souvenirs. The man in the picture below carved the bowl from one chunk of wood. Pretty neat, huh?!
While we were in Bucharest, we stayed at a mission house called Project Ruth that my father-in-law is doing some work with. The mission house sits in the middle of a gypsy community where they provide education and life skills classes. Before we left, they took us on a tour of their school and classes. As a teacher, it was interesting to see how the classrooms looked.
Here is a picture of a class for women to learn how to sew.
Then we moved on to the classrooms at the school. This is a kindergarten class. Sooooo cute!!!
This is a 5th grade class where they were learning math when we walked in. Then they sang "Jesus Loves Me" in English and Romanian for us. Here is the English version... I'm not gonna lie, I teared up a little when they sang this. ;)
Then the ADVENTURES began.
Next we traveled to a nearby town of Sinaia, Romania by train... Train! No big deal, right? Think again my friend...Think again. When we arrived to the train station we bought our tickets at the front booth, thanks to a friend who helped with interpreting. Once we had our tickets in hand, the lady told us that our train was leaving in 5 MINUTES! (We thought we were buying tickets for a slightly later train). So we started husslin' with our luggage in hand! Then, we get to the train but don't know which car to get on to find our assigned seat. So, we stop and look at our tickets... aaaaannnnnnd that's when the train starts MOVING!!!! Let me just be clear here, we are NOT on that MOVING train at this point! No whistle was blown. No conductor shouted out "all aboard!" It just started moving. So as you can imagine, we started moving our little booties along with it in a panic and chucking our luggage on and then jumping on ourselves. It felt like I was in a old western movie. I remember saying afterwards, did that really just happen? Definitely Facebook post worthy! LOL! :)
Anyways, thankfully we all made it with pounding hearts inside! Do I look tired? Cause I am. :)
So now we are in Sinaia, Romania. It has always been a dream of my father-in-law's to hike the mountains in Sinaia. There is a huge cross at the summit of one particular mountain which they call, Caramon. So naturally that is what we went to do... Next adventure begins... We woke up early, go outside and the weather is BEAUTIFUL! Not a cloud in the sky. Now, before I move on, you have to know that this mountain is really steep so you can't just go hike up from the bottom (well, unless you want to go rock climbing and risk your life but I'm not into that). Instead, you take a gondola up part of the way before hiking to it. So that's what we set out to do. However, the gondola is closed the particular day we want to ride it. Whom whooommm! Disappointed, we thought, "Oh well, we will just go later." So, then we try again for the second time... We get to the gondola ride and as we are going up, we ask the gondola worker how long it will take us to hike over to the cross... His answer- 5 hours!!! Remember how I said you have to take the gondola UP? Well, you also have to eventually take it DOWN too. Since it was already about 2:30 and the last one going down was at 3:45 that was out. of. the. picture! Looking back, it really was a God thing that we asked because we could have been stuck overnight up there. And let me tell you, it is C.O.L.D. up there! Whew! Anyways, once we got off the gondola ride towards the top, we decided to just look around and hang out at the restaurant they have up there (mainly for skiers during the winter). The only thing, though, was it was in the clouds so you couldn't really see anything. (Another reason why it was a good thing that we didn't start hiking).
On our way up the mountain on the gondola ride...
Here's our "view" when we got off the gondola looking out over the mountain side...
Here we are... sooo close to the cross but can't get to it. So, again, we think to ourselves we will just go later. Fast forward two days later when we could fit another try into our schedule. We wake up early, and the weather is glooomy like it was in the picture above. At this point, who cares! We are getting to that cross no matter what! LOL! Well, this time the gondola ride is CLOSED due to wind! *Insert frustrated and saddened face of my father-in-law* BUT THEN, a glimmer of hope... a tour guide comes up to us telling us he can take us off-roading to the top in his pathfinder. After my father-in-law does some questioning we find ourselves in that pathfinder ready to go. *Insert excited and giddy little boy face of my father-in-law* :)
And we're off...
We stopped on our way up to take pictures. Notice at this point, we are still on a paved road.
Sooo pretty!
The further we go up the colder it gets and the less paved road we have to travel on. Here I am standing next to a wall of snow that they have shoveled out a road path for the truck to get through.
When I say we went "off roading," I mean we went off roading. Our tour guide took that truck places I never thought a truck could go. You name it... rocks, snow, dirt, mud.. and steep hills. I felt like we went over it all. It was even a little... ummm a lot... scary because there were multiple times it looked like we were about to plunge over the side of the mountain. Plus, you couldn't see 2 feet in front of the car. However, ironically at the same time we felt safe with our tour guide because he had done this everyday for 4 years and he knew every single thing about that path like the back of his hand. The clouds were not a problem for him at all.
I think the look on Bobbie's face in this picture says it all... Scared silly, white knuckling it, but so excited all at the same time. She was literally holding her mouth 2 seconds before this picture was taken screaming like crazy. I laugh every time I see this pic.
Here's Dearing in the front seat taking it all in and loving it all. Notice the cross hanging down from the top of the windshield... swinging away like crazy.
Here we are as close to the cross as the tour guide could get us. (Bobbie wasn't about to get out of that truck since it was sooooo cold and wiiinnnnndyyyy. LOL!)
Since the weather was so bad we couldn't make the 10-20 minute hike over to the cross (per the instructions of the tour guide- and we didn't question him at all). At this point, we had done everything we could do to make Dearing's dream come true but in the end we still had a blast! Plus, we told him he'll just have to come back again. ;)
This is the courtyard of the castle to the Romanian king, Vlad III Dracula, from the 1400's.
And this is Peles Castle built in the 1800's...
All I can say is this trip was fun and adventurous! By the end, we had traveled by planes, trains, and automobiles (and even a boat at one point too). Have you ever been on a trip where you had a story you "just had to tell" when you got back?
