Sibiu Romania

Moving on the fog kept coming & going, I guess that's the price we are paying for the wonderful weather we are having at the moment. Blue skies & sunny but only for a few hours of the day as the sun is so low in the sky, I'm glad we are mostly heading South Eastwards. I think we have been spoilt seeing the countryside in such beautiful light & with the end of the Autumn colours. We haven't found the roads too bad so far, maybe that's having had the last 5 winters on Moroccan roads. The main highways here are full of trucks and sometimes the road surface has been sunken by their wheel tracks. Off the main roads we have found good surfaces until we come to a small village where the nice new tarmac seems to disappear until we head out of town on the other side where it magically re-appears.

 Every side road though seems to be an unsealed track & we would be dubious about venturing down many of them at this time of year. Our van is filthy after 2000 miles but there's not much incentive to clean it as every day's journey invariably throws up more road dirt. We were stuck behind a truck full of soil with water dripping out the back for miles which didn't help, but we will need to find a car wash soon.

Reaching Sibiu our main destination was the Museum of traditional folk civilisation which was more interesting than it's name. It is set in a large forested park with a central lake & many traditional buildings & structures from all over Romania have been re-established here in quite traditional settings. There are wooden churches, windmills, weavers homes, farmers dwellings and all sorts of representations of rural Romanian life which have been brought here since 1963 to preserve them.

It also seems to be a very popular park with the locals for a day out and was very good value at 10leu (less than £2.00) We thought about stopping the night in the car park but the thought of hot showers was appealing. I had posted some info about our blog on motorhomefacts.com & quickly got loads of useful advice & links from other members. Sophie & Adam's site europebycamper.com has frequently provided me with so much useful information so I was very grateful to get some useful links from Adam when he saw my post. One of his links was to a list of Romanian camp sites and we contacted one of the few that are open at this time of year and this led us to http://www.campingdeoudewilg.nl/ in Carta. What a surprise there was no one else there, we haven't seen another motor home since Prague! A very nice site behind the house backing on to fields. Loads of useful information about the area & it's in a small village so you see lots of local life going on. Even though it's not high season everything was operational, a campers kitchen even with electric kettle & hair dryer. Lots of homely quirky ornaments around the site, it must be beautiful in summer with all the plants & vines.

We've been up in the Fagaras mountains today, we'll at least as far a we were allowed to go before the pass was closed at 1246 metres. Some bends that never get sun at this time were still icy on the edges but they had been gritted. Our coldest night so far -2.1C but warm enough in the van & a good excuse to cook warming meals in the oven.