Weather: ☀️🌤️⛅🌤️⛅
Lunch: 🥪🥪🥪 (3 out 5, in the shade with bread, next to the supermarket in Viile Satu Mare)
Track: 🇷🇴 (1 out of 5, a lot of roadwalking through fields and villages, because the track ceased to exist.)
Milestone: 2500 miles!
Campsite: ⛺⛺ (2 out of 5, flat spot in next to a picnic bench, very popular with flies….)
Name of followed trail: – (own detour carei-baia mare)
The trail was long, warm and boring today. We knew before we started that our detour would probably not be really interesting. I didn’t count on tracks to be missing however…
We get out of the forest and into the road. After the first village we get in a long dyke through the fields. It crosses a road, according to my map. It indeed gets to a road, but it doesn’t continue… We look for options, which come down to: a) bushwhacking for a few kilometers or b) a little bit of extra walking, but all in the road. Roadwalking it is…
The advantage is that we do get through a few villages, and pass some supermarkets. No wraps today! We enjoy our bread for lunch in Viile Satu Mare, and at the end of the village we loudly sing our favorite Proclaimed song: ‘im gonna be’ (I would walk 500 miles), since we are now at 2500 miles!
The rest of the walk is rather uneventful, until we get into Homorodu de Jos.
Here, we see 2 horse and carriages filled with logs and some household items, standing still on the road. They seem to be waiting for something, and meanwhile they are holding up the traffic. Later we see that they are getting water from a roadside well for the horses. A police car comes and after some discussion, gives them a fine.
We see all this happen before us and decide that we are rather far away from home 😅!
We continue our walk into the village And look for a place to fill our water when we see a supermarket/cafe with some men sitting in front of it on the porch.
One of them asks if we speak German. So we tell what we are doing, which results in us being invited to sit with the men and have a drink. We go for Cola, but Cola soon becomes beer, and after that we get our Palinka (general terms for destilled alcohol here) from our backpack. This comes with nods of approval from the men.
We have a nice break with these men, eventhough only one speaks a language we know. We show them our map and our website (in Romanian) which helps in our explanation.
Rudi, the German speaking man, insists on giving us grapes and tomatoes from his garden. They are indeed delicious, so we repack our bags with way to much fruits and veggies 😅. Rudi’s brother, who is at the house makes his own Palinka. Ofcourse this needs to be tasted too. Quite the rocket fuel he makes!
We say our goodbyes to the friendly men, who are slightly disappointed that we’re not staying for dinner.
With 30 km, a few beers and some Palinka in our bodies, the last few kilometers are hard. The men warned us about bears, so we decide to look for a more open spot and to take our precautions.
We have a delicious couscous meal with plenty of tomatoes (thanks Rudi) before we get into our tent.
We are a bit wary in this area. Despite the low risk, the precautions, and our positive experiences in Slovakia, we’re still getting used to the ‘there are many bears in Romania’ factor.
Still, it’s time to get some sleep after this long day with an enjoyable finish!