Weather: ☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️
Picnic: 🥪🥪🥪🥪 (4 out 5, bread in front of the supermarket in Copsa Mica)
Track: 🇷🇴🇹🇩🇹🇩 (3 out of 5, nice trail through mostly fields and villages)
Hotel: 🛏️🛏️🛏️🛏️ (4 out of 5, nice room, good shower and good food)
Name of followed trail: Via Transilvanica
We had a night in which we were a little too well guarded….
We woke up in the middle of the night, because the shepherd dogs were all around our tent, barking loudly. Some seemed only a meter from the tent.
Yelling and making sounds made them go away, but the event left us startled in the tent. It took na while before we could sleep again… Mark immediately downgraded the campsite to 0 out of 5…😅
The next morning we leave on another bright sunny morning. The weather is treating us we’ll the last week, and it will stay like this apparently 🙏. Cold mornings, warm afternoons and autumn colours.
We hike through the fields and forested areas to the shabby looking village of Tarnava. At the shop we get some bread for 2nd breakfast, and continue on our way through the fields. We see a very tall chimney in the distance, which belongs to our next village; Copsa Mica. Here we get our lunch at the supermarket. Copsa Mica has been a town with large polluting industries, producing materials like zinc, lead and graphite. It has had the dubious honour to be named most polluted town in Europe in 2006. Now, this is not visible in the town anymore, but there are some pictures of how the industry influenced the towns growth.
We walk through the town, which turns into the town of Axente Sever, ant to the fortified church of Frauendorf, as it is called in Saxon German.
From here it’s another 11 kilometers to our hotel in Seica Mica, Kleinschelken. After the long stretch of villages, we enjoy our hike through the forest and grassy hills to Seica Mica.
We stay at pensiunea Draser, in a really nice room. We meet Rone and Maria, 2 other Via Transilvanica (VT) hikers. We have dinner with them and decide to start together tomorrow. At the hotel they have a Saxon community reunion, and some of the guests come and have a chat with us too. It’s a nice evening with a lot of switching between German and English. When we get to our room, we are quite tired and go to sleep. No barking dogs tonight!