We took planes to get there, trains to travel around, ferries, subways, busses and funiculars around cities; but as a couple of native SoCalians, you knew Tania and I had to rent a car at somepoint.

So in the quiet town of Brasov, we found the last car on the lot, and the three of us headed off into Rural Transylvania.

I took the first shift and we headed out into the boonies. Horses and carts are everywhere, and the landscape is stunning. We stopped for lunch in a small town called Faragas, which naturally had it's own castle, as well as a broken down church, etc. The normal Transylvanian village stuff.

After lunch we headed towards the mighty Transfagaras pass, where Tania took over (to help with carsickness). On the way there we picked up a hitchhiker briefly (the Romanian custom is for them to pay for your gas for as long as they're in the car), and when she realized we meant to go all the way over, some gesticulating happened.

The vistas on the way up were stunning, and completely immpossible to photograph. We stopped several times to try, and for general goofiness (note: goofiness not fully pictured).

It became harder and harder to see anything at all , and we finally made it to the enormous tunnel at the top. It was completely pitch black inside, and with the fog at either end, we felt sensorily deprived. During construction, apparently many soldiers died (the road was originally constructed to defend against the Soviets or something), and it took some convincing for Tania to turn the headlights off.

Apparently I was freaked enough to not take any photos at all. We were lucky it was open, because if it's not, you have to just drive back the way you came.

Continuing on, we came across a little shrine across a river, with an awesome bridge, that was not very feasible. Tania and I inched our way across some wet shaky metal instead, while our artist companion boulder-hopped.

Happy to be back near the ground, I snapped away at lakes and fall colors until my battery was dead.

Little did I realize we would soon come to an awesome dam, and I would be reduced to coaxing a mere four pictures out of the remaining juice.

When we first pulled up and parked, some dogs came running out to bark at us. There are packs of dogs all over Romania, some scarier than others. But so far, for me, the scariest of all has to be these, which came out of nowhere on this giant grey expanse of dam.

Just to be clear: it's only a slight exaggeration to say that a pack of zombie dogs chased us across a huge communist dam in rural Romania. This is why we travel.

My battery completely gave out, but we spent the rest of the night making our way to Curtes de Arges. We had stopped too much, so it got pretty dark. There were some tense moments, where black horses came out of seemingly nowhere, but we made the town.

Then it took us forever to find the Pensione we were staying in. I'm not 100% clear on the precise difference betwen a Pension and a Hostel, but this one was super sweet- huge rooms, private baths, no Internet though. Dinner was at a pizza place (the only food place we could find open), then we hit the hay.

Altogether the drive was one of the most incredible travel days I've ever experienced, and it didn't stop with Transfagaras...

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