And it’s time for the annual family roadtrip! This year’s target – the new Transalpina road, highest paved road in Romania, reaching 2145m altitude.

We sped past the A1 highway and stopped close to Ramnicu Valcea (Hackerville), for the world locally famous mici (literal translation: “smalls”) – famous for being big. I would rather have something famous for being excellent (like mustard from Tecuci), in this case the size says nothing about the quality. We had a few – they were indeed larger than usual, but besides that uninteresting.

On the other hand, the restaurant was far from normal. A disease ridden dog was lying under a table. Fishy people selling crap were circling the tables: a little kid selling forest fruit, followed closely by another little kid selling forest fruit, then (probably) their mother, again with some forest fruit, a dude with a big mustache selling knives, a woman with some perfumes, another woman with some more knives, then a kid with perfumes, then the kids with forest fruit again and so on. We left there with a reflex of saying “NO!” to anything that popped in front of us.

We then went underground, to the saltmine at Ocnele Mari. Walked a little around, breathed in the cold salty air, nearly froze and left.

I searched my GPS for local attractions and found some monasteries. One of them caught my eye with its name: “Manastirea Dintr-un Lemn” – “The Monastery Built from One Tree”. You need a pretty big tree to make a whole monastery – even a small one. And indeed, in front of the monastery there were some giant oak trees.

The monastery is close to Horezu and that’s where we stopped for the night. Horezu is famous for its pottery and you can see pots pretty much everywhere: the entrance to the city is flanked by pottery workshops, the railings on the side of the road are decorated by pots, there’s even a pot-shaped house.