After our week in Ireland we packed our tents in a downpour of rain and got on a bus for the airport to begin the last leg of our World Race in Eastern Europe. The first country on the list was Romania. We were headed into Bucharest where my team would then take a train to Targu Mures.
I was pretty tired as I hadn’t really slept much the past two nights and had filled my days with stuff. My original plan was to sleep on the four hour flight, however I got to sit by my friend Hannah and we talked almost the whole time (including the hour and a half delay while the plane was getting something fixed before we could take off and then the half hour plus wait in line to take off) and I also had a plane date with my friend Erin. So I spent the six or so hours talking instead of sleeping. It was okay because I was glad to talk to the friends I might not see again until we all meet in Kiev at the end of the race for final debrief.
We arrive in Bucharest around midnight and after passing through customs, figuring out our tickets for the train, and other various things for the next day of travel I grabbed my handy and wonderful camping pillow that has been one of my favorite things this year to own and secured for myself a nice piece of floor by the stairs near the other racers and promptly feel asleep for the next four hours. I’ve never slept so well in the middle of an airport but I was out.
So 5am we are all up and drowsy pushing our carts of bags to the sidewalk to catch the shuttle to the train stop. A half hour late the shuttle arrives and the driver who spoke little English knew enough to yell “Quickly, Quickly” as we tried our best to pile huge bags and people into the van. We get packed in and the van drives.
It stops halfway up a ramp with one street light on it and not much else. It is dark so we don’t see anything around us. I ask where we are. Jonathan responds, “Well, either we’re at the train stop or they’ve brought us to the middle of nowhere to take all our stuff.” I hoped for the first and it was true. When we drug our things up the ramp we saw the platform.
We hopped on a train about fifteen minutes later that I am pretty sure is from the communist reign. We began throwing bags on because trains don’t wait and our bags filled the hallway. We had to climb over them to get anywhere. The rooms were not full but had random people sleeping in them and nobody really wanted to go wake them up so we stood for 45 minutes in the hallway until we got to the next stop.
We had a quick stop to get McDonalds and got back on another train. Where we discovered as so often is true there isn’t room for our packs. We managed to find space, but made some people mad with all our junk and us. Charity and I sat in a car with packs above us one in the seat two on the floor and her big djembe in her lap. We slept almost the whole 7 hours. At one point when we were both coherent for a few moments I commented that what I’ve seen is beautiful and I wish I could stay awake more than two minutes to see more of it.
We had a short stop at another train station where I paid to use the nastiest squatty potty I’ve ever seen in my whole life. I’m quite sure it too was put in during communist rule and possibly not cleaned since then either.
Finally our last train and only a two hour ride. The best part of this ride was the part where we all fell asleep and then woke up thinking we were about to miss our stop and trying to pull our bags down and hurry to get off the train. We didn’t make it off but luckily it wasn’t our stop so all was well and we were ready when it was our stop.
We get to Targu Mures and find out that we are about two hours from where we should be to meet out contact. So we are now stuck in a sketch train station with all our stuff and people who keep walking by us over and over checking out our stuff and waiting for us to leave it alone long enough to walk away with it. Then the police tell us we need to leave. However, we don’t speak their language and they don’t speak ours. Thankfully the man at the ticket booth spoke enough English to help us and he said we could stay until midnight and if we still needed a place to go to come tell him and he’d help us out.
We sent out scouting parties and found a hotel about a fifteen minute walk away. There were just enough rooms and so we got to spend the night in comfy beds with wi fi (we used it very little as we were tired and wanted to sleep) and best of all hot showers. It was a good night of rest after a long two days of travel and prepared us for one more day of travel.
We got up the next morning and pulled on our packs one more time and walked downstairs. We were told we would have a bus to pick us up at 11am. When we walked into the parking lot a man got out of a mini van and waved at us. We looked at each other fearing that this was our “bus” and wondering how on earth we were going to fit all 14 of us and our stuff in this thing for a two hour ride. Luckily this was not the bus, though a bus here is a van. It is more like a 15 to 20 passenger van than a bus, but lucky for us it was tons better than a mini van. So we piled our stuff in one more time and loaded up.
Two hours later we went grocery shopping and then we were off to our location. We pulled up to a large house with amazing views of the surrounding mountains and hills. The grass was lush and green and it looked beautiful. The inside was equally beautiful. Hot showers, amazing warm beds, and get this….TV with even a few English speaking channels. Granted we didn’t have much time for watching TV, but when we had an off day or an evening free we enjoyed some Discovery channel or a movie. It was like the Ritz for us. Even crazier we only had rooms of two or three. This is almost unheard of on the World Race, unless you are tenting in your own tent.
It may have been a long three days of travel but it was beautiful and in the end God gave us an amazing place to rest and serve. We have since moved back into Targu Mures and we no longer have TV, but still hot showers and warm beds. Honestly, we aren’t that interested in TV these days anyways.
