Weather: ☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️
Picnic: 🥪🥪🥪 (3 out 5, bread with sausage and cream cheese + leftover breakfast)
Track: 🇷🇴🇹🇩🇹🇩 (4 out of 5, nice trail through the valley, across fields and through villages, with great mountain views)
Hotel: 🛏️🛏️🛏️ (3 out of 5, nice room with good shower)
Name of followed trail: Via Transilvanica
Getting up is a bit harder today, after yesterday evening. The price of Romanian hospitality 😅.
We get a good breakfast and even a tour through Rau Barbat. Father Christian shows us the honest story of the village, the beauty and the sad things. He shows the evidence of a declining village with less and less children, a closed down school building as a silent witness of this. He also shows his hopes for the future with Via Transilvanica going through this village, bringing more people and livelihood. He is working on a very nice guesthouse in the old Stone House. For anyone interested, it should be ready next summer!
His vision of hikers in a hammock in the garden, cooling their feet in the stream and sleeping in a nice room is a great one. We wish that it comes true next summer indeed.
And a tour from a Father isn’t complete without showing the church ofcourse. The small, beautifully decorated church is a very peaceful place to visit. Christian turns on religious music that sounds both inside and outside of the church. We say our goodbyes and walk out of the village, accompanied by the song ‘Veniti crestini la rugaciune’ coming from the church. We feel blessed by our visit to Rau Barbat and the kindness of its people. We wish them a prosperous future♥️!
The trail isn’t hard today, hiking through fields and villages in the valley, next to the Retezat mountains. The views are really good from here.
We have lunch on a bench in one of the villages. We realize that we still have 21 km to go, which is quite a long way. We decide to take it a bit more easy and stop 6 km before that in Nucsoara. That does require a 36 km day tomorrow, but we can make that work..😁
We often get asked how we can keep hiking like this every day. I’ll be honest; we do get tired and we are happy to get to our spot for the night sometimes. But by doing nothing much in the evenings, we can balance it out and keep going. So when we do have evening activities, we need to balance it out in a different way .
Yesterday, a long day of hiking, helping with making Palinka and going to a party made it impossible for our bodies to get the well deserved recovery time. By stopping early today and having a bed, we can make up for that.
After booking our hotel, we continue our trail towards Nucsoara, where we arrive around 17.00. We chill a bit in our lovely green room and go for dinner at the restaurant next door. It’s actually closed, but the lady has guests for whom She prepared some dishes, so we get to eat those too. that’s fine with us, because they taste good, and the only other place we can get food is a bit further away.
After dinner it’s time to rest, relax and go to sleep early.