big adventure, buying this
now i can play civilization again.
so yesterday (Sunday) did big offroad trip with zita, her husband Barni and Donci, their son, as well as Gizi, Zita's mom and Dönci's grandmom. German army jeep, serious, mercedes benz engine, we must have done about 15 miles of genuine cross country i mean no road or if it was a road then it was known only to horses and pedestrians. Another 15 miles was dirt road, another 5 or so was so rocky and bumpy that you had to hand onto stuff in order not to be shaken out of your seat. Barni drove, Gizi sat in front with him, the rear of the vehicle is benches that sit parallel to the road, so there was little to no back support. We were gone a total of about 6 hours, probably 4 of them driving. Total distance covered was about 45 miles, but when you are going only about 5 or 10 mph, you dont get there very fast.
The country was wide open, steep hills, brooks, springs, patches of dense deciduous forest, occasional stands of firs, lots of open meadow pasture land, absolutely no farming or crops. We passed umpteen piles of freshly felled trees, there is serious logging going on. I felt like I was somewhere in Montana. No really high mountains, but off in the distance we could see the Hargita, which is about 1600 meters. right at 5000 feet, still with snow on top. We were mostly on a ridge top that was 3000 ft
I did take a couple of photos, so will post them when i figure out how to do it. we did three lookout points, visited the village where Zita was born (today's population approximately 15), and also wound up having a bit of dinner with Barni's parents who live in Zetalaka, a village of about 2000 located some 12-15 km northeast of here.
today is april 2, the trip was on march 31, I will keep adding detail as I come back to the blog.
This is Dönci (sounds a little like done-tsee), the foto is of his maternal great grandparents (I think)
This is the route we took, starting left center from Udvarhely about 7 miles to the first horizontal slash mark.
From then on it was all cross country to the lookout statue (about 70 feet tall). Here is a foto from the internet. The construction of the stature was an act of private piety by a local family who is big in the dairy business. The location is on a high point overlooking one of the valleys, elevation bout 3100 ft.
The dark side of the Jesus statue....
I did not climb all the way to the top, access was by narrow steep steel ladder, and my knees were not at their strongest. Also the day was a bit hazy, so distant objects appear a bit blurred....
We continued to a second lookout, a more conventional wooden tower that overlooked a valley to the East. On the map it is the second horizontal line. I took a short hike and snapped a few pics of the forest....
The trip continued for about two more hours, mostly at speeds of 5 to 10 (at best) mph. Much of the ground was muddy from recent rains. We reached Szent Csed, a village of about 4 houses, the place where Dönci's mom, Zita, was born. From there a road led downhill toward the river that also flows through Udvarhely... the Kiküllő, which at a about 25 miles upstream from the city is really just a brook. The road reminded me of a stretch of the Oregon Trail that we saw on one of our trips to California (I think it was in NW Nebraska), where you could see how much deeper the trail was than the surrounding terrain. The road from Szent Csed must have been a couple hundred years old, it resembled more of a streambed than a road, with large rocks and an occasional boulder making passage by normal auto totally inadvisable.
After we reached the river, the terrain leveled out and we were able to travel much more normally. We continued downstream toward Várság, perhaps the largest village in Romania, Zita claiming that the village limits were more extensive than that of Bucharest. Not sure about that, but a Wikipedia article says it is 76 sq kilometers, so 8 km by 9 km, roughly, which means a square about 5 miles on each side, so she may be right.
Downstream from Várság is Zetelaka, a largish village of about 3000, where Barni comes from and where his folks still live. We did another hill climb up to the hunting cabin. All of these hills lie at about 3000 feet, and the valleys are generally at about 1500, so it is a pretty steep climb any time you do it. Again, nearly all of this was cross-country.
Bear poop, no shit. The brown stuff at center bottom of the pic. This was out near the hunting cottage that Barni built out on a ridge about 2 km from his home village of Zetalaka. There are a few others in a group that uses the place for hunting... deer, wild boar, sometime bear. We found scat from deer as well.... The guys have rigged up a barrel that hangs from one of the trees, and it is set up to distribute corn once or twice a day, so as to attract the game to the area.
Afterwards Barni got a call from his folks insisting that we go to their place for a visit. Ordinary family house, comfortable, reminded me a bit of my grandparents' homes. Dinner was soup (both a fruit soup and a meat broth, I chose the former which was apple and sour cherry, wonderfully sweet and flavorful), then breaded-sautéed turkey cutlets with mashed potatoes. Apparently turkey is a delicacy here and is expensive--something on the order of veal in the US.
We got back to Udvarhely around 6 pm. I decided to rest, fell asleep at 7 and was out till midnight. I got up, made some coffee, did some vocab stuff and a little reading till about 3 am, then went back to sleep till 6 am, my normal getup time.
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