Saturday, 17 November 2012

Romania first impressions


Very peaceful night considering we were in a truck stop & we awoke to a heavy frost & blue skies. 

The clocks have moved on an hour so are are back to slightly later evenings. Sunny days just give everywhere a cheerier feel, everywhere looks more rustic, stacked up hay bales & chopped wood piles, horses pulling old wooden carts & people pushing hand carts. Many people trying to flag down traffic for a lift to the next town, there are many abandoned decaying industrial buildings & railway tracks that we're never sure if they still function. Mostly though its agricultural but with much smaller fields than Hungary & a lot of small roadside stalls of people selling their own produce. 
The road was not too bad though only single lane & with many trucks or speeding & overtaking drivers. I seemed to be the only one driving within the speed limits in towns & villages & would invariably end up with a queue behind me until I pulled over. We eventually ended up going for about 30 miles on a very empty but good stretch of Motorway though we were starting to get worried as there were no exits for such a long way. We decided to explore a bit and go cross country on what looked like small sealed roads which they were but as we got more remote the tarmac seemed to be more covered in mud, I guess from vehicles & carts from the fields. There was little traffic on the road but it was slow with many bends & we weren't progressing very far. Finding ourselves on a quiet road we found a place to pull off for coffee & decided to stop the night a couple of hundred metres down a firm track hopefully without passing traffic. 
The temperature quickly dropped to around 2C as the sun was setting without a cloud in the sky & showing a sliver of a new moon. 
We have been so glad of the Webasto Diesel heating, it saves all the problems of carrying enough gas & has always been very economical & it's great being able to turn it on whilst still in bed in the morning. Both our 5 year old leisure batteries continue to give us the electrical power we need though the solar panel doesn't get much charge now the sun is so low, but as we are driving most days it's not a problem. Most of the electric power still seems to go to run the fridge though I sometimes wonder if it's actually warmer in the fridge than in the van through the night.
Not a sound in the night but -1.6c our coldest so far & we woke up in thick fog & this view out of the window

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