Weather: ☁️🌧️🌧️🌧️☁️ (rating 2 out of 5, perfect hiking weather…)
Picnic: 🥪🥪🥪 (3 out 5, bread with cheese from the supermarket, while it was still dry)
Track: 🇷🇴🇹🇩🇹🇩🇹🇩 (4 out of 5, really nice trail up into the forested mountains)
Hotel: 🛏️🛏️🛏️ (3 out of 5, nice room, good food and friendly people)
Name of followed trail: Via Transilvanica
We left around 8.00 when it’s only just light. In a few days the daylight saving time will change the times of sunrise and sunset, and it will become more important to leave at first light.
For now, we walk out of Caransebes into the fields and forest around the city. We start in our rain gear, the first time since we started on the Via Transilvanica! Incredible that we’ve had such great weather all these months.
We’re in and out of rain suit all morning, but it’s mostly dry. We have lunch after 14 kms, before we start our 8 km long 700m climb through the ghost town of Lindenfeld towards our destination in Garana. When we get closer to the top of the hill, it starts to rain quite seriously, so we get into full rain gear and won’t get out of it anymore.
The trail is beautiful today in the misty autumn forest, eventhough it is a bit slippery on the muddy tracks. Closer to Garana the trail becomes a tarmac cycle path that leads us into the village. Garana is a long 1 street wide village with some nice houses along the street. Our pension is further down the street than we’d have liked, but makes up for that in atmosphere as soon as we get inside. The woodfire is burning in a nicely decorated, small restaurant and we get a clean comfortable room. After a hot shower we hang our clothes to dry and go for a lovely dinner. We have a chat with the other people in the restaurant and enjoy a good meal and a dark beer, the first one after months of pilsners. Mark is particularly happy about this…😁
After dinner I manage to order our dessert in Romanian 😀😀. Apparently I didn’t do it correctly, because in stead of 1, we get 2 massive papanasi desserts 😅. Mark must have still been hungry, because he managed to finish his, while I can only finish half of it. They were really good though!
With full stomachs, we get back to our room to relax and get a good night of sleep.