Vampire slaying

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You know when you arrive in Romania. For the first time, driving across Europe you stop at border control and your passport is checked – although disappointedly not stamped. Then there are no motorways. It is like stepping back in time immediately. The queues of traffic and the slowness of single carriage roads takes me back to my childhood (shows my age) or even to driving in London, except of course the landscape is rural and flat. The roads need resurfacing and the car is laden with arts materials; the scraping of the underside of the car makes me cringe and drive even slower.

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Although it is only 200 miles to our destination it quickly becomes apparent it will be difficult to achieve that distance in half a day. We stupidly ignored the signs at the border informing us we need to buy road tax, as there was no obvious place to buy it. Of course the authorities are cleaning up with this system and fining stupid foreigners at every opportunity. And there are plenty! The major route is inundated with police, who stop you for not having full headlights on as well as driving with no permit. When we get stopped we very obligingly show them every piece of paper we have in a very middle aged English woman kind of way – hugely confused and with much, ‘I’m so sorry but can you say that in English’ and collect our fine for both offenses. The form suggests it is a verbal warning – but obviously we are deluding ourselves – when is a verbal warning written?

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Luckily we see a sign for a campsite just as we were beginning to give up hope and drive through a shockingly poor village, making way for cattle and haystacks. We are so overloaded that the progress is painfully slow and villagers looks at us with curiosity. The campsite however is secure and continental, run by a couple that moved here from the Netherlands, in the Communist era to do charity work. It is reassuring on our first night, to find people who speak English and run a sophisticated and safe campsite. We are on the edge of the Transylvanian mountains and to add to the atmosphere we experience a dramatic thunder and lightening storm. We have garlic and vampire slaying kit to hand and have a couple of extra glasses of wine to steady our nerves.