My planning for this European trip started with a search for flights over the pond using frequent flyer miles. I was looking for a window of about two weeks either before or after my grandson’s early October birthday. I found a great deal on Iberia Airlines to Madrid that matched up perfectly with a group tour. Once in Madrid, it would be easy enough to find cheap flights or flights using miles from Madrid.
A few months after booking the flights, I tried to register for that group tour, but that operator no longer offered the dates I had seen earlier. However, I found a different, and actually more interesting tour, with a different operator. I had a phone call with that company to clarify a few questions. Two days later I went to register for that tour, and they had dropped the dates! I searched again, and found something from a third operator that worked: A one week tour in Bulgaria. This time I successfully registered. That tour started four days after my flight arrived in Madrid. I had never been to Romania, the country just north of Bulgaria, so I decided to go there for my first four days.
The flight to Madrid, and my flight connection in Madrid to Bucharest (on TAROM Airlines) all went well. However, I experienced a slight glitch getting out of town (I left from my Brookfield home). Cindy took me to the Goerke’s Corner location in Brookfield where a Coach USA bus has a stop and goes to O’Hare. There was no Coach USA bus there. There was a KM Excursions bus with a West Bend Power Hockey sign on the side. At 12:10, that was the scheduled departure time for our bus, that KM bus left. After a few minutes more of waiting, and no real time status available on the Coach USA app, Cindy called Coach USA. She was told the bus departed on time at 12:10. Crap! Anxiety! That KM bus apparently was our Coach USA bus! My flight was departing from O’Hare at 4:30, in about 3 hours. The next bus would get in too late for my flight. Would we need to drive to O’Hare? Yuck, especially for Cindy. I knew the bus that left 15 minutes earlier made stops at downtown Milwaukee and the Milwaukee airport. We got in the car and headed that way. Cindy got on the phone with Meg, an experienced traveler on the bus to O’Hare. Thankfully, she answered the phone and had time to help us out with online research. We could not make it to downtown Milwaukee in time, but we could make it to the Milwaukee airport 5 to 10 minutes before the scheduled stop there. We headed that way, and made it in time. Sure enough, up pulls a KM bus at the Coach USA stop at the Milwaukee airport. Whew! It took me a little while to get into vacation relaxation mode after that. The good news is the bus made it to O’Hare (although about 15 minutes late). There was no line at the Iberia check in. I made it through security in about ten minutes. It was 30 minutes before boarding time. Finally, it was time to relax!
I had reserved an Airbnb for four nights in Bucharest, that was centrally located. Among other things, it was very close to a stop for the airport express bus. I boarded Bus 100 at the airport and just tapped my credit card on a box on the bus. The bus costs 3 lei (68 cents). On the way in to town, bus inspectors onboard were checking for tickets. I was a bit nervous since I was not sure if my credit card tap had worked, since the screen displayed something in Romanian. I handed them my credit card, they checked it with a device, and went on to the next person. I had arrived during rush hour, and Bucharest traffic is horrible. But once we got close to the central city, we were able to use a bus only lane that flew past the standstill traffic. Google maps had told me a car drive from the airport would be about an hour, but the bus took only 35 minutes.
My Airbnb was small, but everything was fairly new and worked well. The outside of the building looked a bit sketch, as did the ancient elevator, but the apartment was perfect. I had only a five minute walk to the gathering points for the two tours I took while in Bucharest, so that was handy. I took advantage of a washing machine–I had only three days of laundry at that point, but that helped me keep my packed clothing down for my carry-on luggage.
My first tour started at 10am the next day, a Tuesday. It was a five hour tour to explore neighborhoods and food. It was a great way to learn about Romanian history, especially Communist times and the chaos of the transition. We had seven people in our group-me, four women from the UK, and a Californian originally from Chile. It was a fun group to spend the day with. We had several stops for food and drinks, and even hopped on a tram a couple of times to get to places. A food fact from my tour guide was that the national vegetable of Romania is pork! One of our stops was at a place where they serve the best mici (sausages that are the national dish) in town, basically a dive but it actually won a Michelin star a few years back. So that we had more than just meat and bread, we had stopped just before at a large local market where all the fruit and vegetables were from Romania (the fresh raspberries were bursting with flavor), along with local cheeses, dried meats, pickled vegetables, etc. We added some local beer, and a shot of tuică afterward, and it was a feast!
The next day I had a 12+ hour group tour to Transylvania. The main stops were Bran Castle (Dracula’s Castle), the ancient town of Brasov, and Peles Castle. This was a bus full of people (front half of bus on the English speaking tour, back half was the tour in Italian). My seat mate happened to be in his mid-30s from Pasadena, CA. His job takes him to Munich a number of times each year, and this time he added on 2 days at the end to explore Romania. I had an enjoyable lunch with him in Brasov. Peles Castle was amazing.
The third day I had in Bucharest was on my own. I spent an hour walking around two sides of the Parliament building. This is the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon. The building is controversial with the locals because the Communist ruler at the time leveled a neighborhood of over 2,000 homes to build this palace to himself. I had lunch close to my Airbnb at a small, non-touristy place tucked back in a residential neighborhood. I had an amazing fixed price menu lunch for about $8 ($11 with a large beer). I liked it so much, I went back to the same place for dinner. The same waitress was there and was delighted to see me.
On Saturday morning, I was on the Express bus to the Bucharest airport at 6:30am. My one hour flight to Sofia was on TAROM, the national airline of Romania. We had to take a bus from the terminal to the tarmac where the plane was parked, and I saw the plane was a prop plane. I had not been on a prop lane in probably twenty years. The plane inside had 1 x 2 seating, but had a wide aisle and surprisingly good overhead luggage space. Thankfully the flight was uneventful.
My four days in Romania were a lot of fun. Now, on to Bulgaria!
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