The long promised tale of The Journey...

So I promised to regale you with my trip from Tirgu Mures to Piatra Neamt and I apologise for taking so long to do so. All I can say in my defence is that Iași was lovely!

Anyway, The Journey. It started off when I left my hotel at 7am in order to get the local bus down to the bus station, around 5 km away. Many things run to completely different schedules here at weekends, and buses are no exception. After lots of googling, reviewing pictures of the nearest bus stop for the magic words 'Autogara Voiajor'

(Nos 5 and 5e to save you the trouble!) I felt confident that if I left the hotel at 7am and walked the 15 minutes to the bus stop, if I missed the 7.20am bus I would still make my minibus in plenty of time if I got the 7.50am bus (I had to be at the station at least by 8.50am but the lack of queuing here made me want to get there by 8.30am at the latest). If I wasn't able to get a seat on that minibus, there was only 1 other that day going to Paitra Neamt from Tirgu Mures.

Anyway, the bus arrived as expected, but what wasn't expected was the speed at which it would deliver me to the bus station. We did 5km, through the centre of town, in 7 minutes! With the driver on his mobile phone! He very sweetly stopped talking on it long enough to make sure that I alighted at the right stop...😱

Anyhow, that put me at the bus station a good 1hr 40mins before my bus was due to leave! After a lovely messenger chat with Martin, a friend from University, my bus duly arrived and I completely abandoned my British love of queuing to make sure I got a seat on it! I chose my seat very carefully and so was a little disappointed when the woman in front of me decided to recline hers. However, my knees effectively stopped that kind of behaviour!

It turns out that the driver of the minibus had been to the same driving school as the local bus driver and we set off apace to Piatra Neamt. Before long we were heading into the Carpathians and I suddenly realised that it was starting to get white outside. Yes, we were driving through snow!

This didn't seem to register with the driver who continued at speed along winding roads, up the mountain, driving a bus in which the seatbelts didn't work... It was pretty hair-raising I can tell you! Unfortunately all the windows on the bus were covered with advertising so my pictures aren't so great.

We came back down the other side and then shortly after stopped for a break for food, toilets etc. I was only expecting the journey to be 4.5 hours and so I had some crackers with me and I'd had breakfast so figured I didn't need anything to eat. Fortunately I did decide to have a toilet break which is something I was very thankful for later! Unfortunately, the girl in front of me also did the same and she got back to the bus before me and reclined her seat! The cheek! This left me with no leg room and so I decided in the end to move back a row, to one one row in front of the back seat. 

After the stop a second driver took over. I'd been a bit relieved as the impression I got was that he was quite reserved and so I figured that he wouldn't drive quite so fast. I am such a rubbsh judge of character. He drove even faster than the first guy who seemed like a Sunday driver in comparison! This was even scarier when we got into the mountains the second time as the snow was actually falling, and the wind was pretty strong too! 

We got some way up the mountain before a van on the other side of the road stopped to speak to the driver of the vehicle two in front of us, the car directly in front of us, but not us, because our driver drove off without giving him a chance to say anything. Hence it came as a bit of a surprise when we got further up and were stopped by the Police, along with lots of other cars. From what I could make out, some trees had come down across the road and we had to wait for them to be cleared. The wind was blowing pretty strongly by now and the snow coming down quite hard...

We waited, and we waited, and we waited and after about an hour, two people who had been to check out the blockage came back and effectively said it was a pretty hopeless situation (you understand I got all of this from the shrugs and general body language!) and so our drivers decided that we would go back down the mountain and take a detour (a roughly 100 mile detour...) to get to our destination.

We set off hurtling back down the mountain and came to an abrupt halt approximately 4 minutes later as a tree had come down across the road back off the mountain!

Fortunately as you can see, the fire brigade were already there chopping it up! Anyway, when we'd had our toilet stop earlier, one guy didn't get off then, but he decided to whilst we were waiting for the tree to be moved. I watched him get off and walk round the side of the minibus, but I didn't see him fall off the side of the mountain, it was the shouting of the other people who had seen him that alerted me! Fortunately he wasn't hurt, and once we realised this, me and another girl off the bus were in fits of laugher. It just seemed the most ludicrous situation! Comedy is a great unifier!

Around 15 minutes later, the tree was cleared and we set off again, this time even faster to try and make up some time (at least I assume that was the reason...). And so for our very long detour. We ended up having to go back the way we'd come for about 15 minutes before before heading along a different highway. At ths point, all Highway Code requirements went out window. We were overtaking in no overtaking zones, on blind bends and I'm sure I have no need to tell you that speed limits were for guidance only! My roots are properly showing through now and I can only guess at how many more grey hairs will be visible as a result of this journey!

The great thing though was that the detour took us through some of the most beautiful countryside alongside lakes Vaduri and Pangarati. If you get chance, have a look at http://ananp.gov.ro/ananp/2017/08/03/lacurile-vaduri-si-pangarati for some pictures. The only downside was that this road wasn't in any way as well maintained as one would have liked and I was a row further back in the bus than I would have liked, but thankfully I'd only eaten crackers so it was more a case of being shaken to death than feeling ill. More annoying was the smell of bacon butties, which a couple had bought at the pit stop earlier in the journey and only partially eaten so the smell of that pervaded the bus and made me very hungry!

As we were approaching Piatra Neamt, fortunately I was keeping an eye on google maps as at the outskirts of town, just around the corner from my hotel, the bus driver pulled in for people to stop and get snacks! I used this as my opportunity to alight 200m, rather than 2km from my hotel. Or so I thought... It turns out that Ulmon CityMaps2Go doesn't always have places in the right location. My hotel being one of them! I wandered up the road and went to the building that it assured me was Hotel Moldova and between that and the 'welcome' mat outside the front door I was lulled into a false sense of security, sure that I had the right location, despite there not being a sign outside. So I opened the front door and fortunately clocked that the place literally reeked of smoke and there was no way the hotel would before I entered! I'd nearly walked into someone's house! So I beat a hasty retreat and eventually ended up calling the hotel to ask where they were located! Which turned out to be in exactly the same place as the house I'd walked into but one street over! And so eventually, 10.5 hours after leaving my hotel in Tirgu Mures, I arrived at my hotel in Piatra Neamt! A little tired, a little stiff, but all in one piece and thoroughly relieved that there was a restaurant onsite where I could eat a meal more substantial than crackers!