Let's just say Travel to Romania was a little different than usual. From Mbabane, Swaziland we drove about 5 hours to Joburg airport. Which we than waited 6 hours to get on our flight and fly to Istanbul, Turkey where we had about an hour for a layover. (side note: sunrises there are beautiful. I only saw one, but it was beautiful.) From Turkey we flew to Bucharest, Romania!! Where we waited 3 hours for a city bus that would take us 30 minutes to get all 42 of us to the train station.
Which is where we would dispurse to our teams, get our tickets, and then WAIT! Our team and the team we are spending the month would wait another 11 hours, scratch that 14 hours, for our train. (the joys of waiting and waiting and waiting for a train that is not on time)
During that time we were able to spend more time with our squadmates until they departed for their trains. We were also able to make friends in the train station, or should I say the McDonalds that offered free wifi. Which you know full well that all the racers took full advantage of. Our new friends,
Oana and Remus, who in waiting for a package serenaded us with music, and somehow I ended up with fresh cheese, cottage cheese and sausage from Remus' family's farm. They were simply amazing, and wonderful people that we were blessed to meet.
1:45 am we hoped on our train where it would be another 11 hours until we would make it to Arad, Romania. From there we all waited some more for our contact to arrive and then drive another 45 minutes to our actual city.
Before making it all the way to our house, there was one more little glitch in the whole process. Our driver could not drive any further! Not because of his driving skills, which were great, but because of the 4 feet of snow in front of us stopping the car from continuing on.
So what do we do? We could have sat there, but that's just not how we roll. What we did was throw a few packs on 2 sleds that were miraculously available for us to use. Or we grabbed our 40 something packs and throw them on our backs and start making our last 500 meters to our housing.
About 55 hours of travel and we made it to our home for the month.
