Time to travel!

Despite the name of my blog, I haven’t done any serious travel since I got back from South America mid-December 2012. Last year I was busy with the renovations to my house, but no such excuse this year, aside from the Detroit wedding. All the time I kept saying that my next trip would be back to South America, as I still needed to visit the northwest quadrant – Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. I bought the guidebooks, I read the guidebooks, I made a list of when the weather was optimal where, I reread the guidebooks, but somehow I never produced an itinerary.

It had been fourteen years since I took early retirement so I could travel before I got too decrepit, and I had just had another birthday, so I certainly wasn’t getting any younger. In fact I felt that I was slowing down, and I was facing serious eye surgery in the not too distant future. Time to get moving!

So, just back from the Washington-wedding trip, eating breakfast, I asked myself whether the sad lack of an itinerary was actually due to my not really wanting to go to South America. If I had really wanted to go, wouldn’t I have planned it by now? Maybe, I really wanted to go somewhere else. Maybe, Europe? Next thing you know, I had the Thomas Cook rail map of Europe spread all over the breakfast tabel.

I decided that this would be a “go back to” trip. I would go back to favorite places in Europe, traveling more slowly than usual, so I could enjoy them at leisure. But I would start with somewhere new. South and west Romania. I had visited the north – Maramures and Bucovina – back in 2006, but I hadn’t made it to Transylvania in the south. Friends had visited Romania in the spring, and reported interesting Art Nouveau buildings in the west, near the Hungarian border. (Shades of Subotica, the Art Nouveau gem in Serbia, right on the Hungarian border.)

I started by locking in the flights – into Bucharest and out of London on American – and checking on availability for the lovely apartment I had stayed in the last time I visited Budapest. Then I found that the railway timetables weren’t cooperating with my plans, and I would be better off flying some legs. Nice to Pau and Bayonne to London were so hopeless I abandoned the idea of going back to Basque country and substituted Lisbon as my last stop.

My planning usually includes hanging out at Barnes and Noble with a cup of coffee and their guidebooks, before I buy the one(s) I’ll take on the road. But guidebooks for Romania were in short supply. Fodors hadn’t updated their Eastern and Central Europe tome in years. Rough Guide had gone all digital. Bradt didn’t cover some of my destinations. Lonely Planet still had an actual paper guide, but now combined Romania and Bulgaria into one book. I bought Lonely Planet, and cut it in half. I’d do the rest of the trip with a few chapters bought from Lonely Planet and downloaded, Streetwise maps from previous trips, and whatever I turned up online or at Tourist Information offices.

Given the lack of up-to-date guidebooks, I relied more heavily than usual on Tripadvisor for hotel recommendations, plus reading the few Romania trip reports on fodors.com, and combing through the many bookmarks saved on my browser. I booked either direct, or through booking.com.

By the time I left, on September 23, I had all my hotels and flights arranged, and the most expensive of the train trips. Yes, I’m posting this from Hungary in the middle of October, but I arrived in Romania the end of September. I put a report up on my website for my 2006 visit to Romania titled “Roaming Romania With the Tour Guide From Hell”. If you search on the tour guide’s name – Ciprian Slemcho – my report still shows up almost at the top of the list, and he spent years trying to get me to take it down. (Starting out with threats wasn’t the smartest move, but he isn’t very smart.) I think he has finally given up, and is now doing business under his wife’s name, but I chose not to advertise that I was back in Romania.