Today was "just a driving day", from Varna to Bucharest and for much of the morning this required back-tracking over yesterdays route generally through farming country. The day did not really get interesting until the Bulgarian-Romanian border.
Our border crossing from Bulgaria to Romania was the most chaotic we have experienced so far on this leg of our travels. The border is the Danube River and the crossing is over an old soviet era bridge (built in 1954), with approach roads that have clearly not been upgraded since the bridge was built. The chaos was caused by the long line of semi-trucks jostling and pushing to get into the border area; in the process they pretty much blocked access to the border for other traffic.
When we finally got to the Bulgarian exit station we discovered that it was also a toll station for the bridge over the Danube and that the customs and immigration staff were also collecting the toll. The various security staff at the station seemed relaxed and friendly wanting to ask lots of questions about our truck and why our map did not show our travels in Bulgaria. However the guy taking the bridge toll and checking we had paid Bulgarian road tax on entry was having a bit of a fit about the inadequacies of our vehicles US registration documents, since the document did not state the weight of our vehicle he did not know how much to charge us.
Once across the bridge the processing by Romanian officials was pretty straightforward and we were soon parked in front of a little kiosk that was a combined currency exchange and vignette sales office. For those that don't know a vignette is a mechanism used by many European countries to charge visitors road tolls or road taxes. Typically one buys a vignette for a period of time (week, month, year) for a price based on vehicle category, and then affixes a sticker to the vehicle windshield. These are typically alternatives to most tolls. In their wisdom however the Romanian's only provide a receipt not a sticker and hence need to have check stations along the road to ensure compliance - we saw signs and buildings for these "vignette"checking stations but did not see any in operation.
The drive from the border to Bucharest was easy, but the motorway was definitely below European standard. Approaching Bucharest from the south we decided to take the "ring route" shown on all of our maps around the western side of the city in order to get to the camp ground we had researched which was located on the northern side of the city.
Well the ring route turned out to be a real soviet era nostalgia tour, broken pavement, decrepit buildings, belching traffic and an average speed of 5 mph made it an interesting but arduous trip.
The reward for enduring the ring route turned out to be the campground, Casa Alba. Set in a nice forest about a mile from the US Embassy it is a collection of nice holiday cottages surrounded by a grassed tent area. In the middle of the cottages a paved parking area is equipped with electrical outlets for campers.
But best of all - and one can thank the soviets for this - the shower and toilet blocks were centrally heated by one of those hot water heating systems, and because of that there was an almost endless supply of hot water for the showers.
The one thing the Russians really know how to do is to heat buildings.