This is the last leg of the Maramures adventures and also when things began to unravel – you knew it was bound to happen!

WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT GODDAMN ICE-CAPPED MOUNTAIN BACK THERE THOUGH?? I don’t think I have ever snapped so many pictures out of a car window before in my life. But anyway, this was after we left the Barsana Monastery and stupidly said, “Eh, we’ll eat at the next stop!” when we were considering whether or not to get something from the food vendor in the monastery parking lot. Dumb dumb dumb.

The geotag on this picture tells me we were passing through Strimtura. Also, I’d like to note that lots of elderly people bike around in Romania. I was saying that you rarely see this in the States and Henry immediately referenced two old men who bike through our town of Brookline regularly and I was like, “OK HENRY, BUT ASIDE FROM THEM!!!” God.

Calinesti provided some STOP THE CAR! worthy views.

So, in an effort to keep this final Maramures recap short and short (I really want to move on to SIGHISOARA which was my favorite town in Romania!!), after leaving the monastery (maybe by the end of this post I will have learned how to spell MONASTERY on the first try and nope, that one was not it) I had thought we were headed to Budesti but Henry had looked at an incorrect version of the itinerary that Copilot had lovingly helped me craft and he was heading somewhere else which I didn’t know until we reached that somewhere else and discovered that the only road to reach it was blocked off by the electric company and a small huddle of villagers. I don’t know what was going on, but it was clear that the incident was not close to being resolved.

Henry was all, “THERE HAS GOT TO BE ANOTHER ROAD TO GET THERE” and started jabbing at the car’s navigation screen with his angry man stubs. This brought us to a DIRT ROAD that wound up a hill and into farmland and then eventually turned into a DIRT PATH which prompted Henry to scream “WE ARE ON SOMEONE’S PROPERTY I THINK THIS IS A FUCKING HORSE TRAIL” as the car was catapulting us over rocks and divots. I have some video of this – it was cracking me up, but Henry was SCARED. (Not of some farmer coming after us with a shotgun, but that he was going to bust the rental car and be in BIG TROUBLE with the Enterprise guy at the Bucharest airport who fucking haaaaaaaated us.)

It was around this point when I realized, “Hey wait, where are you even trying to get us to?” after I really – finally – looked at the map on the screen.  Henry was trying to get us to Ieud, but I wanted to go to Budesti. I still don’t know exactly at what point the miscommunication started to bake this casserole of chaos, but here we were in the middle of nowhere, Henry frantically trying not to get the car stuck or send us careening over a surprise cliff.

Green = where we started

Blue = where we were lost

Red = where we needed to be

Of course, the only way to get to Budesti from Ieud was to go all the way back to Barsana and down to Budesti. We were running out of daylight and had to check in to our guest house by no later than 8:30 that evening, so it was a frantic drive from here on out (spoiler – everything in Budesti was either closed by the time we got there or we missed some magical entrance, so basically the whole last half of our day was spent in the car, starving because we didn’t pass a single store until much later!).

I will say it wasn’t all a bust though because the scenery in Budesti was chef’s kiss. Not to mention we had another “YOU CAN’T TAKE THIS NORMAL ROAD SO WE ARE REDIRECTING YOU TO SOME RARELY USED MOUNTAIN ROAD” moment which was terrifying because the road was pockmarked with potholes and if ever we were going to break down and get mauled by bears, it would have had to have been on this portion of the drive. Especially since the sun was setting and every roiling shadow I saw on the sides of the road just SCREAMED “big bear silhouette!!! alert!!!” to me.

Honestly though, we might have missed out on whatever crafty local wares were to be had in the village of Budesti, but we got to cleanse our eyeballs with some poppin’ views.

Cernesti brings the vistas.

Driving through a town called Strimbu-Baiut – the sky was immaculate.

After stopping at a convenience store in some tiny town and stocking up on snacks* in lieu of dinner (REMMEBER WHEN I THOUGHT WE WERE GOING TO EAT DINNER IN BUDESTI LOLOLOL), we made it to the town of Beclean around 8:30 as expected and the owner (?) of the guest house was waiting for us. We were the only guests in the whole place and I felt so awful when I learned later from Henry that she had come out specifically to meet us and check us in. Ugh, hopefully she lives close by and didn’t have to sit there all evening watching the news (which I noticed was talking about Charlie Kirk #vom when we walked past the office to enter the house.

*(I got some delicious pastry that I grudgingly shared with Henry, and cheese curls. Both were good but not SATISFYING.)

After bringing our stuff in, we headed out to two nearby grocery stores (one was the ubiquitous Penny and the other one was a smaller shop that I didn’t write down the name of but did say that Henry majorly embarrassed me at the bakery counter by saying CHEESE? CHEESE? over and over to the confounded lady working back there until I waved him off and just pointed to the one I wanted after determining on my own that it was a fruit something or other and when I ate it in the next morning in the car, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was filled with a delicious raspberry filling) for some more sustenance and things to eat in the morning. I was obsessed with these 7 Days “croissants” that were pretty stale tasting but filled with delicious things like chocolate and various fruits. I preferred the “forest fruit” variety. It was just a cheap and super-convenient breakfast pastry to eat in the car and also something that I would never eat at home, so it was also a treat! I didn’t think they were strictly distinct to Romania only but when I googled, the website has a New Jersey contact address which made me LOL. Maybe I can find them in Wawa next time I’m out that way?? BUT WILL THEY HAVE FOREST FRUIT.

I did also see in my Internet travels that Romania specifically is “obsessed” with them. Someone asked “why” on Reddit and there is a whole thread of Romanians arguing about if they’re good or not lol. It sounds like the general consensus is that it’s a nostalgia thing – grabbing one from a convenience store on the way to school as a kid type shit.

That Candy Can sat in the car, unfinished, for a few days before I finally tossed it. It was like drinking sparkling simple syrup. My teeth were screaming.

It’s amazing how tired simply being in a car for most of the day can make you. I slept real well that night!

I took these pictures the next morning before we left (it was actually kind of creepy being the only guests there, I’m not going to lie):

We sat out here the night before, drinking a beer and I wrote some postcards – MAYBE IT WAS FOR YOU.

This was the beer we drank that night, I had to take this picture the next morning when I realized that GOD FORBID I had forgotten to check it into Untapped.

Here’s a compilation of our Maramures day – the last clip is my favorite, also I purposely recorded for nearly the entirety of Call Me Maybe because it reminded me of MY LOVING SON, CHOOCH.

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