Having spent a couple days in Romania’s capital city at the end of my two-week tour of building houses in Cluj and around Transylvania, I’m not sure why it gets a bad rap. Sure, it’s a rather large city. But I like gritty urban environs just as much as I like glacial lakes and mountain … Continue reading
The parts of the forested Romanian countryside, dotted with villages, fortresses and castles is a delight to explore these days. But many of these previously fortified cities represent a refuge from danger that may have been on the horizon, just a few hundred years ago. Seeing them gives one a true appreciation for the ways … Continue reading
If you only had time to visit one city and use it as a homebase to explore some of Transylvania’s most popular sites, make it Brasov (bra-shov). From Brasov we also took day trips to see Viscri, Bran Castle, Rupea Fortress and Rasnov Fortress and Peles Castle on the way to Bucharest. Wander Without a … Continue reading
Despite popular belief, Transylvania is not a town or city, but one of several regions, occupying the northern center of Romania. Practically everyone’s heard of it from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula in which Jonathan Harker stays at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Subsequently he discovers the Count a vampire. You already … Continue reading
This was the moment I’d been preparing for—meeting 11 volunteers in Cluj-Napoca to kick off our week of building with Fuller Center in Jucu de Sus, a bucolic village about 35 kilometers outside of Cluj. First, The Best Part Let me begin by saying, for me, and I believe for many volunteers, the best part … Continue reading
Hoping a flight from Amsterdam to Cluj-Napoca on LOT through Warsaw, I continued to make my way east, the furthest east I’d ever been on the European continent. I had no idea what to expect, only what I’d read and heard from others visiting Romania’s second largest city, the unofficial capital of the Dracula-famed Transylvania. … Continue reading
Taking advantage of a cheaper flight from the east coast of the USA to get me across the pond, I opted to spend two jampacked days in Amsterdam on my way to Cluj, Romania to meet my volunteer team to build houses with the Fuller Center Romania. Plus, it helped me begin to get over … Continue reading
My trip to Arizona was last minute. Unexpected. I decided to take my Level I course in Healing Touch energy medicine in Sedona after a class in Delaware cancelled. When I told my friends they all lamented, “We feel so bad for you!” As winter was drawing to a tiresome close in the mid-Atlantic where … Continue reading
It was Spring Break for my teenage daughter and friend. She wanted to go somewhere warm. I didn’t want to deal with the continued hassle of international travel in March 2022, so I started looking south, in the good old U, S of A. Almost guaranteed sunny, or at least warmer temps, we decided on … Continue reading
I found myself, by myself, with an excuse to visit a part of North Carolina I’d never seen. I attended a weekend training to learn Healing Touch a form of energy healing therapy. My secondary motivation was to check out the area, a short two-hour drive from the Charlotte Douglas International Airport, to see if … Continue reading
Global Staci 