Escape Velocity

What were we thinking?! One year exploring Europe; sounds like plenty of time. Ha! Our only plan was to wait out our Schengen time first in Türkiye and the Balkans, and again in Morocco. In between we only had a vague plan and decided almost day by day where to go and whether to stay longer in a place or move on. We made a few mistakes in planning, e.g. overestimating our distance to the ferry in Marseille, which caused us to unnecessarily cut short our time in Italy. All those blank places in the middle that we didn’t get to will be for next time, especially France, which we found so welcoming to motorhomes, unlike England, sadly.

The UK might break the bank, especially with the weakening dollar. We can’t return to the Schengen zone — most of Europe — until mid July. In the meantime we’d like to be someplace warm. It seems we’ve had The Year Without Summer except for a few weeks in Türkiye and a brief heatwave in Romania. We spent so much of the past 13 years in the tropics but this past year had us wearing holes in our wooly socks.

Still, look at that track! Twenty-six countries in one year. (For reference, we spent six months each in Scotland and Ireland alone.) Every mile was driven by Jack. And remember, he was driving a right hand drive vehicle on the right side of the road. Yesterday he drove onto the ferry in St. Malo on the right, and when we docked in Portsmouth he drove off on the left. Never a wrong move by my hero!

We don’t know what the coming year has in store for us. Like the rest of the world, and especially those of us from the US, we are on tenterhooks, adopting a wait-and-see approach. We’re aware of how fortunate we are to be able to travel, and we have our fingers crossed that we can continue to explore the world at our age-adjusted pace. There’s still so much to see.

Right now we have van maintenance to do, a safety inspection and insurance renewal to get through. After that we’d like to be someplace warm. We’d like to stay in one place for a while. We’d like to see family and friends. We’re working on it.

Uffda, it’s been awhile. Since last we wrote our pace has increased to the point where it’s hard to even, as my mother would say, sit down and say “God bless me,” let alone write blog posts. Add to that the difficulty in keeping three devices online through ten countries and negotiating the logistics of different toll and emission schemes and all the other challenges of a European road trip and I hope you can forgive us for this lengthy lapse in posting. I’m here to just bring you up to date on where we are and we hope to backfill when we get a chance to sit down and say, “God bless me.”

We left the UK on the twentieth of May after finally getting insurance and safety inspection sorted. Entering the EU starts the clock on our Schengen time, a limit of 90 days in 180 days. It’s a rolling calendar and complicated to manage but we’ll deal with that in a later post.

We took the ferry to Calais and in the following weeks we drove through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. We visited Dinant, Phalsbourg, Ulm, Regensburg, Pilsn, Prague, Auschwitz, Krakow, and many places in between. We’re currently in Romania where we’ll be for maybe two weeks.

The theme for the itinerary is to follow the trail of Jack’s ancestors who left Lorraine, France, in the late eighteenth century and traveled down the Danube River to what is now Romania where they settled an uninhabited region under a scheme to claim land for the Austrian-Hungarian empire. This migration of German peasants to an empty corner of Eastern Europe is well documented and an interesting part of European history. We were determined to see where Jack’s ancestors started out, where they ended up, and something about their life along the way. It’s been quite the education. As a family historian, it’s a gift to have a cultural group remain intact, to have the descendants of that group preserve their customs and genealogy as completely. We’ve had some amazing encounters on this journey but again, more on that later.

From Romania we plan a quick trip through Bulgaria to Turkey where, if I can sort it, we’ll leave the van for a few weeks while we visit our family and friends in America for the first time in nearly 2-1/2 years.

As always you can follow our track at https://share.garmin.com/escapevelocity. Be sure to tap View All and zoom out. Otherwise you’ll just see our current position.

Here are some random shots to whet your appetite.

We have many stories to tell. We’ll get to it.

We set aside the afternoon to visit the Evangelical Cathedral with its tall spire and unique tiled roof. Construction was begun in 1371 on the site of a Romanesque church, and was finally completed in 1520. It was originally Roman Catholic but like many churches we visited, converted to Evangelical after the Reformation.

For 300 years the church was the burial place for local VIPs. The practice was halted in the 18th century, the existing tombstones removed and embedded in the wall, making an unusual gallery of the dead. A QR code leads to details of each person.

The church houses two pipe organs, and we were fortunate that they were both being tuned and played while we were there.

Hats off to Father Xavier Dressler, record-holding organist. Forty-seven years is admirable.

There was a lot to see in the cathedral but Jack kept eyeing the tower steps.

Longtime readers know I suffer from what I consider a completely rational fear of heights. Nevertheless I almost always follow Jack on his missions to get to the top of wherever we are. In this case, I’ve got no problem with enclosed spiral staircases. You can’t see up and, more importantly, you can’t see down.

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.” I didn’t give it a second thought. Spoiler alert: I should have.

After what seemed like we should have been at least halfway, the spiral steps ended and we crossed a scaffold bridge into the upper tower.

And this is where my palms started sweating. Looking up, I gasped at how much further we had to go. And looking down, well let’s just say I tried not to.

This is where my fear of heights becomes irrational. Intellectually I know this is perfectly safe, yet I had to talk myself up step by step.

I arrived at a small platform at the level of the bells where I took a breather along with a couple of young men who were also finding this climb a little more challenging than expected. We all hoped the bells wouldn’t chime just then.

Past the bells and up one more flight of narrow open steps and we were finally at the tippy top. And yes, the view was worth it. But my palms are sweating even now with the memory of looking down.

We were so fortunate to have a beautiful sunny blue-sky day and we spent a long time admiring the views from every side.

And then it was time to go down. Down is harder because, well, you have to look down. And that’s the part that scares me.

Going down those open stairways was the most frightened I’ve ever felt. The fear shocked me because I’m normally not a fearful person.

I was comforted knowing I wasn’t the only one who took a long breather between flights. And there were others who had to be talked up or down inch by inch. I instead had a personal photographer who documented my experience.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I got past those flights of open stairs and scampered down the spiral steps to the bottom.

As we left the tower it sounded like the organ tuner was putting the pipes through their paces. We found a seat in the vestibule and listened until my palms dried and my heart rate returned to normal.

I wrote before that we don’t know exactly where in Transylvania Jack’s grandmother was born. But as we listened I imagined that she may have sat in this church and heard this organ over a century ago.

As we drove closer to the Carpathian mountains Jack grew more and more concerned about the condition of our front tires. They passed inspection before we left the UK but Jack wants more tread before we start climbing mountains. He wants Michelin CrossClimate M&S tires and he will not be denied. Why we didn’t do this in a place where we speak the language I don’t know but the search was on for specific tires in a specific size somewhere nearby in Transylvania.

As luck would have it we found a Michelin dealer on our route. We walked in and showed them a screenshot of what we wanted. The man shook his head. They don’t have them. No surprise there.

“Can you get them? How long would it take?” I asked. We’re in a nice place. I figured we could wait a few days or a week.

He thought for a moment and shrugged.

“One hour?” he guessed.

Sold!

We settled into the customer lounge and before long Escape Velocity had two new front shoes. We both feel safer and Jack says she handles better, too.

We’ve looked forward to visiting Transylvania for a long time and now we’re finally here. We’re in Sibiu, the former Hermannstadt, settled by Saxons in the 12th century. The Saxons were the first wave of Germans to lay claim to these parts, long before the Donauschwaben were sent down the Danube in the 18th century. And just as Jack’s paternal grandfather was part of the Donauschwaben migration, his grandmother was what’s called a Transylvanian Saxon, descended from those early migrants from Saxony as well as Luxembourg, Belgium, and Lorainne. Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly what village she was from so we won’t be searching graveyards for her forefathers, but we’re happy just to explore the area she was born in.

Sibiu, as Hermannstadt, was once the capital of Transylvania and it’s grand and beautiful.

On this sunny day we enjoyed street performers and buskers as we explored the city.

There’s a lower town and an upper town. The upper town is the old city center with most of the historic buildings. The lower town holds colorful houses and remnants of the city walls and defensive towers.

The centerpiece of the upper town is the magnificent gothic Evangelical Cathedral of St. Mary, with its seven-level 73 meter tower, the second tallest in Romania. I think you can guess where we’re headed next.

Still in Romania, we Escapees find that our crack logistics department has us parked up in a huge paved but rough and tilted public lot. I would imagine the rain drainage would be quite good. We’ve got the leveling ramps out but things aboard EV remain a touch askew. Typically in Romania one can experience one of those “On the Beach” moments when a place seems abandoned, with very few people about. At least there‘re no crowds to avoid as we walk across the lot to the Saints Constantine and Helena Cathedral.

It’s handsome without being ostentatious until you see the four beautiful ancient carved Roman columns on the side portico. 

The Romans were quite busy in this area. Come to think on it, they were busy nearly everywhere.

In the morning we hiked up to the main event in Hunedoara. Corvin Castle, high on a hill above town, can only be reached by first running the gauntlet of trinket vendors while simultaneously climbing the hill. If they notice that you’re struggling they attack like hyenas sizing-up the weakest member of the herd, because you can’t get away quickly and chances are you don’t even have the breath to say, “NO.”

Still climbing across this magnificent bridge and through the gate.

Entering through the main gate you arrive in one of the most interesting and tilted courtyards I’ve ever seen. The rock substrate bulges through the level of the pavers making for an especially wobbly ankle buster.

The construction was begun in 1440 but it’s often difficult to know what is part of the original fortification. After the fourth and most modern phase of construction Corvin Castle is considered one of Europe’s largest castles. Extensively restored, maybe even reimagined, it’s difficult to know where the “real” starts or stops.

In 1458 the second phase of construction was initiated . This unassuming doorway is the entrance to the Knights Hall.

A long hallway leads to the oldest section of the original castle.

Tower stairs.

The castle has its own app and Marce has been using it to guide us through the joint. It sorta works. After getting lost for quite some time we found ourselves down at the well. Legend has it that the Voivode of Transylvania, ruler of the castle, proposed to his Turkish prisoners that whoever digs a well and finds water will earn his freedom. Three prisoners volunteered. The castle was built on solid rock, so fifteen years later the three finally reached water. By this time the Voivode had died and his wife now ruled in his place. She feared that the three, now old men, knew too many of the secrets of the castle so she sentenced them instead to death. I suppose there’s a lesson in the tale.

What an interesting castle but Schengen never sleeps so we’ve got to move on.

We have long anticipated visiting the Romanian village that Jack’s family called home after their journey down the Danube in the 1770s, and from which his grandfather emigrated in the early 1900s. I had a list of ancestors who are buried there and we hope to find their graves.

We found the Catholic cemetery and parked at the gate on a brutally hot day. It was the beginning of an intense heat wave that would last for weeks and affect most of Europe.

This region, known as the Banat, was previously under Austro-Hungarian, then Hungarian rule before being awarded to Romania after World War I. Notice, however, that the inscription at the top of the gate is in German. The area was inhabited by ethnic Germans, including Jack’s family, for centuries.

The cemetery is in poor condition and difficult to walk around in places. As soon as we entered the gate we found stones with the family names we were seeking but not yet the specific ones.

We could only stay out in the heat for a half hour or so before taking shelter in the shade or back at the van.

While we were having lunch in our campervan a Roma woman walked toward the gate carrying a bucket. She stopped at our open door and put her hand out for money. We honestly didn’t have a farthing because we’d just left Hungary and hadn’t yet found an ATM for Romanian currency. We shook our heads and indicated “No.” She didn’t react and just moved on. Jack said her begging gestures seemed automatic and well-rehearsed. A few minutes later she came out of the cemetery and her bucket was now filled with water from the tap in the graveyard. She walked past us without a glance and crossed the street. Presumably she lives in a house with no running water.

We found a row of stones bearing the name Schütz, the original family surname. In the dialect spoken here it sounds like “Shits” which obviously doesn’t go over well in America. Jack’s grandfather was encouraged to change it to Schulz when he became a citizen in 1915. (I tried calling Jack “Schitzi” but it didn’t stick.)

We spent the better part of two days trying to read every stone in the cemetery. The stones are very deteriorated and the inscriptions are nearly impossible to make out. In places they were completely encased in ivy that we both tried to tear off so we could make out a name and date.

We aren’t sure if we found the specific people we were looking for because while we could usually make out a surname, we couldn’t be sure of the first name or the dates.

We are sure, however, that this plot of ground holds the remains of generations of Jack’s ancestors and their neighbors. I’ve read the parish records of this village. I feel like I know these people. Seeing their final resting place brought the history of the village to life.

We left Bogarosch and drove to Timisoara, the county seat, to visit the Banat Village Museum.

We parked in what little shade we could find with our campervan door open and a young man out for a run stopped to say hello. Noting our UK license plate he asked it we were British.

“American,” we told him, “in a UK van.”

Turns out he’s German and his parents are Donauschwaben and left Romania in the 1990s for Germany. The history of Germans here runs deep.

We were excited to visit the museum but with our usual luck it was closed, not just for the day but for an entire long weekend for a special event.

The guard at the gate took pity on us when we told him we’d come all the way from the US to visit and he let us in to see the historic houses.

These are original, although certainly repaired and restored, and they helped us visualize the life Jack’s ancestors lived.

The house below is from the 18th century, so would have been like the original homes in the Banat after the migration. I’m not sure that chimney is up to code.

This one from the 19th century is a step up from the crude timber house. As the village prospered their dwellings grew larger and more comfortable.

We enjoyed exploring the buildings and we appreciated the information plaques in English. It was a disappointment that we couldn’t enter the rest of the museum but we were grateful to the guard who let us in at least to this part.

We had one more stop to make before we left the Banat.

After Jack’s grandfather and his sisters emigrated to America, their parents, Jack’s great-grandparents, moved to a neighboring village, and presumably that’s where they died. I spent years trying to find where they were buried but never found a burial record. As a last resort we drove to the village and walked the graveyard. Since all the parish records are so complete and residents so well documented from birth, through marriage, to death and burial, I didn’t hold out much hope of finding them. But we had to try.

This graveyard is smaller and in worse shape than the first one but we did our best to read the graves before surrendering to the blistering heat.

This marks the end of the trail of Jack’s paternal ancestors. Well, not really, but we’ll take up the journey of another branch a little later. Now we just want to get somewhere cooler and see something of Romania that isn’t a graveyard.

It’s an unassuming approach to the border crossing between Hungry and Romania. This is our first hard border since Calais, even though on paper both countries are Schengen and as such this ought to be a soft border. It’s easy peasy if you enter via air or sea, but on land they still have this foreboding inspection facility, so what the hell, it’s business as usual.

You just know you’re going to get the full Monty inspection of all the official forms and papers you have and especially close scrutiny of your face against the picture in your passport. No smile, no welcome into their country like we’ve become accustomed to. They weren’t happy with our proof of insurance, but they didn’t stop us either. I guess old Soviet-satellite habits die hard. I took a beat before I dropped Escape Velocity into gear just to quiet the heart down. [As of January 2025 this is now a soft border.]

We noticed immediately that these were not going to be the Hungarian roads we were used to, but poorly maintained in comparison.

By afternoon we rolled into Bulgarus, which for 150 years was my paternal ancestors’ home town.

I think It’s safe to say I am not to the manor born.

Just finding Bulgarus was a major goal. Generation after generation of my ancestors were recorded in the parish records, and finally we’re here.

A lot of the German families began leaving the area in the early 1900s, both for economic reasons, and because Hungary threatened to force cultural assimilation and military service. Recruiters from the United States enlisted workers for the steel mills in the Midwest. That’s how my grandfather and most of his family ended up in and around Pittsburgh.

Many of the Donauschwaben families remained but World War I and World War II took a toll on any goodwill Romania may have felt toward Germans.

By the 1970’s Nickolas Ceausescu’s nationalist threat of “Romania for Romanians” put paid to what was left of any ethnic Germans. The German government paid Ceausescu 60,000 marks per person to buy their freedom from this communist nation. Ceausescu’s cult of personality soon lost its charm and in a popular uprising he and his wife were arrested by the military while trying to escape in a helicopter. Their personality ended with a firing squad.

I haven’t unpacked what it all means but it’s evident squatters have taken over and stripped many of the abandoned buildings. We watched a Roma woman fetch water from the graveyard tap and carry it back to the derelict house she was apparently living in. On her way past the van she stuck out her hand for money.

Like their roads Romanian graveyards have been left to their own devices.

The overgrowth made hunting for specific names on old worn tombstones exhausting in the oven of Romanian summer heat.

I’m sure Bulgarus was a much more pleasant town in the early 1900’s but poor ground is poor ground and ethnic tension is ethnic tension.

Our wet Slovakian weather continued and glued us to the inside of the van waiting for sunshine.

Eventually Jack got bored and said we may as well be driving so we continued south through more Pennsylvania look-alike terrain.

As we approached the Hungarian border the sky suddenly brightened and so did we.

Where we can park the van makes a big difference in how we experience a city. In Budapest we found the perfect place on the edge of the city and near both the bus and the metro. In minutes we were at stop #1 on the self-guided audio tour I downloaded. This has been my approach here in Europe. If there’s a free walking tour we take that, or if there’s a free-to-download audio guide we do that.

We started with a walk through an enormous city park where we searched for statues of Bela Lugosi, George Washington and a tiny Dracula.

We appreciated the beautiful weather after the rain we’d had the last few days.

Budapest is huge and there’s more than you could possibly see in a year, let alone a day, but top of my list was the central market, a restored Neolithic hall where I could have spent a week and a lot of money. Markets are always my happy place.

Jack indulges my love of markets but he does occasionally need to be fueled with coffee and a pastry. We found this fun cafe with a choice of international brews. We didn’t do a taste test but we did rest our legs for the next stint.

Why is there a statue of TV detective Columbo in the middle of Budapest?

We wanted to visit the Holocaust Memorial Park but the area was closed for security reasons and we could only photograph the Emanuel Tree through the fence. Each leaf bears the name of a local Holocaust victim and I’m disappointed we didn’t get to see it close up.

Much of our visit to Budapest was about finding public art. We sought out this memorial to Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz who saved more than 60,000 Jews from the Nazis by creating safe houses and providing transit documents. He was awarded “Righteous Among the Nations” by the state of Israel.

Oh sure, we should be eating traditional Hungarian food, but when we find eggs Benedict, we have to go for it.

There were so many more places we wanted to visit in Budapest but our feet gave out before our desire to see them all. Down at the river we thought we might book a sunset cruise but it was right out of our budget. So we settled for a beer.

Prague, Krakow, Budapest. We’ve loved them all and they all deserve more than a quick visit. Some day maybe we’ll be back. But the calendar reminds us we have a long way to go and a dwindling number of Schengen days to get there.

We drove south and parked in a beautiful field. Tomorrow we head for the Romanian border.

When one finds oneself in the Auschwitz parking lot sitting at the operations office table in Escape Velocity after a rough day, physically and mentally, you can expect some simple solutions. Our short term goal is Budapest. Laying a ruler on a map from Auschwitz to Budapest will describe the in-depth planning going on. It’s the Keep-It-Simple-Stupid plan.

The eagle-eyed Escapees among you will notice that Slovakia is directly in our  path, but we weren’t in the mood for details. We do know that Slovakia uses the Euro. And we know we’ll have to buy insurance when we arrive at the Turkish border and we’ll have to pay in Euros. We have only zloty and koruna, and too little to exchange for Euros. It’s been a real surprise to find so many EU countries that are not using the Euro, and as far as we can tell Slovakia is the last country we’ll transit before Turkey where we can get Euros. So our only goal for Slovakia is to find an ATM and get a pile of Euros before driving to Hungary.

It’s raining and Marce found a small parkup on our route, but it’s quite tilted and a tight squeeze. We got out the ramps and made it work.

We awoke to a light rain tapping out a tune on the roof and cornflakes with coffee. On our navigation screen I noticed a purple dot almost overlaid on our own position cursor, which means there’s some kind of heritage item of interest near by. The rain lightened up so I hopped out of Escape Velocity but all I could see was a small forested village nestled in a mountainous terrain. I walked around for a few minutes. Turning around I happened to look up and my jaw bounced off the pavement. Three hundred fifty feet up was a castle in the scudding clouds, perched on a rocky outcrop.

I fetched Marce and we tried to find out how to get up there. Sure enough, down the street I could see a small hut which is probably going to house a ticket office. When we asked, the woman in the ticket kiosk just pointed up an impossibly steep, slippery, cobbled, ankle wobbler of a path.

Marce more than hung in there. 

Finally we made it to the permanent slippery draw bridge at the entrance.

If this place looks at all familiar it turns out it’s probably because this castle stood in for Count Orlok’s Transylvanian Castle in the 1922 film Nosferatu. I’d say it was well chosen. It has a creepy Eagle’s Nest kind of vibe.

The original wooden fortification was built up here on this rocky outcrop in 1241 in the kingdom of Hungary, after the Mongol sacking of Oravsky Podzamok. Borders, names and people moved and changed around a lot back then. (Come to think of it, they still do. My family couldn’t even answer the question, “Where are you from?” without a ten minute history lesson which was impossible to comprehend. I don’t think even they fully understood it.)

Where was I? Oh yes, the tunnel.

We are constantly climbing.

Marce gets the Eagle’s Nest Medal.

What goes up must come down. This is where the slippery part really came into play.

We moved Escape Velocity from the tilted parking lot down to a more level place by the river just as the rain resumed.