...I'm coming for you with my Iveco! Yeah, sometimes it feels like driving through a field here... I think I've mentioned before that the roads here pleasantly surprised us. But it's also happened multiple times that we've driven through a village where they don't even have pavement, and those side streets are sometimes a real tank proving ground. And yes, we've already broken two mugs. The coffee ones, of all things! :( That was when we managed to hit a really big pothole while driving through that terrain in our 4x2 van with shock absorbers that don't really absorb much. Or a drainage ditch.

And how did we end up in these parts? First, we enjoyed some moments of 'peace' in the north in the Bukovina region behind the walls of painted monasteries. We ended up only visiting two of them. It started getting a bit repetitive, and like in all tourist destinations, it was losing its charm a bit when they wanted contributions for everything possible.

Since crossing the Carpathian mountains was quite hard work for our Iveco, we decided not to torture it with the journey back to Transylvania, which had been our main goal in Romania, and we'd slowly head east to the sea and the Danube Delta.

And Iveco really liked that. When we drive on main roads, it really flies! It even does 75 km/h! We got into the habit of stopping somewhere by lakes. The first stop was by a lake near the city of Iasi. The next morning we left early and took a walk to the ruins of Schit. Everything there is in Romanian, but it seemed to us like a Romanian Stonehenge with a huge head in the background.

The next 2 nights we stayed by Lake Solesti. The weather was beautiful, so our battery was only being charged by solar panels and we therefore didn't need to move on. Plus, one local guy stopped by to visit us early in the afternoon. He pulled up in front of his house and started chatting. He'd been out for wood all day, which he was hauling home on a cart pulled by an old mare. He offered us wine. Given his jovial mood, we figured he'd already drunk 3/4 of it. So we offered him whisky and had a nice chat. Well, he spoke Russian and we don't speak Russian very well. But we understood each other pretty well! Then he left us some homemade cheese, said goodbye, and rode off. But we couldn't anymore. :D

The next day we were woken up by a herd of mooing cows that were just being driven out to pasture. And in the afternoon we were racing away from them, because we knew that if we didn't leave right away, we could be waiting another hour for them to cross. They're cows, after all, and when they decide they want to graze right here, nobody's getting them to move anywhere...

The next night we stayed on the bank of the Siret River. There we were woken in the morning by a flock of sheep for a change... And then came that day. I decided I'd try driving. And it was a disaster. Not only did I break one of those mugs, because getting out of our sleeping spot was through some pretty crazy terrain. But then, when I was already driving on a normal road, I had no sense of the vehicle's width at all. And Leo kept telling me the whole time, drive more to the left! And I was like, I'm not going to drive down the middle! So we argued a bit until I got out and said I wasn't going to drive anymore. After a while, he got behind the wheel and drove at least through those initial villages to a more level road. There I started driving again. Going straight was fine, and since there was one village after another, I didn't have to go faster than 50 km/h! :)

Before the next big city - Galati, we switched and Leo drove again. I definitely wouldn't have made it through the city! We wanted to get across the Danube River to the delta and our navigation gave us a choice: to the destination either about 230 km or 35 with a ferry. We decided on option B. I was so glad Leo was driving! Hitting the ferry and then parking on it would have been too much for me. The 10-minute boat ride flew by way too fast. On the other side, we only had a little bit left to Muntii Macinului National Park. This time we arrived while it was still light, so we could even look around and started looking forward to the next day when we'd walk through it.