…continued from CROATIA | 4 Friends in Split & Beyond Day 5 | Heading North by Northeast We picked up our rental car in Split and headed northeast toward Paklenica National Park. We planned a hike that day and found fine food and rest at the lovely home of Visnja and Davorien, full-time residents of … Continue reading
Croatia, inspired backdrop for the award-winning Game of Thrones series, much like the fantasy television drama, is (almost) too good to be true. Every vista, worthy of a photograph. Welcoming people, rich culture, and natural beauty abound. Add to that the ease with which visitors can move throughout the county and region, and you have … Continue reading
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
Just a short time exploring the cobblestone streets of Lübeck, Germany is enough to soak in the culture of this once major trading center founded on the Baltic coast in 1143. One of the thriving medieval cities of the Hanseatic League, a confederation of merchant guilds and market towns which monopolized trade routes in the … Continue reading
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