Noelle, Amadeus and I caught the last lovely sunset over Sibiu, after Mass, before we hit the road en-route to the Transfagarasan Highway.

The Transfagarasan Hwy was built in the 70’s, by the communists, as quicker road through the mountains in the event of an invasion. It’s widely believed that there was hundreds of deaths as a result due to the horrific working conditions. Mainly carried out by untrained workers and requiring more than 6 thousand tones of dynamite.

Jeremy Clarkson of “Top Gear” rated this the “best road in the world” which prepared me for all of the twisting and winding. However my interest was well and truly piqued so we scheduled it in regardless.

This was one of the days in our itinerary I was most concerned about as Gio and Noelle suffer quite sever motion sickness at the best of times. I dosed them twice with phernergan, armed them with buckets, kept the windows down and the tunes and snacks coming in thick and fast. Amazingly we got through the whole day without a single incident.

We were so glad we had taken the risk as the day turned out to be one of the highlights of our whole trip so far. The autumn leaves and melting snow were just so magical. The only thing we needed to complete our Romanian bucket list was some bear sightings.

Bear #1 caused quite a stir. The car in front of us had thrown it some bread.

Bear #2 was waiting patiently for us and very much enjoyed the apple I had for him.

We decided we had completely maxed out our luck and stopped in at a great place for lunch. Gio loved eating the head off my trout 😳🫣.

 

Noelle got to throw Bear #3 it’s apple.

Thankfully we found a Bear #4 so Gio got to feed it an apple as well.

All we needed now was one more bear for Amadeus. We were absolutely thrilled to come around the bend to a whole family of 3 bears making 7 sightings in total. We were all so stoked. I had the kids on alert for bear sightings since the very start of our holiday and I think they were starting to become a little disenchanted with the possibility.

Next up we found this incredible dam.

and weird statue on the hill.

huge haystacks