If you’re enjoying following this journey on the Via Transilvanica, I’d be grateful if you’d like and share this post. And if you’d like to see more photos and videos from the trail, you can find me on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, BlueSky, and Threads or find me on LinkedIn.
“The road is life.” Jack Kerouac
“We are the laziest f@$&ing hikers.” Massimo
Hike #1: The Remote Cabin to Prigor
Because I’m woefully behind in writing thanks to the ongoing lack of cell phone and internet service, you’re getting another two-for-one hiking special.
Think of it as the Costco membership of hiking stories: more miles, more disasters, same price.
After breakfast at the remote cabin, we said goodbye to my harem of men.
Yes, of course they were sad to see me go.
I mean, who wouldn’t be devastated to lose their gorgeous American female hiking companion?
Okay, maybe not gorgeous. I hadn’t showered in two days but I was almost certainly the best-looking woman within a 10 – maybe 20 – kilometer radius.
Who cares if I was also the only woman within that radius.
Details.
Either way, I like to think my departure left a sizable hole in their hearts.
We’ll always have that night in the rustic cabin, boys.
Memories.
Massimo, Costin, and I set off on a very long but thankfully gentle-sloping walk downhill through a gorgeous forest. The trail wound alongside a beautiful stream that eventually fed into the Nera River.
It was peaceful. It was beautiful. It was serene.
And there were 30 kilometers of it.
Thirty.
For those of you who don’t speak European hiking, that’s about 19 miles.
Thankfully, it wasn’t a difficult walk. It was actually quite pleasant.
It was also, eventually, a little boring.
The scenery didn’t change much.
Trees.
More trees.
Stream.
Another tree.
Occasionally a different-looking tree would appear, which really helped break up the monotony.
After seven weeks of hiking, I have become the kind of person who looks at a beautiful forest and thinks, Yes, lovely. But do you have anything else? Perhaps a castle? A goat? A small village with a bakery? A man selling cheese?
Wait, on second thought, no cheese, please. Last time I ate homemade cheese, I had food poisoning for 24 hours.
The one thing I consistently looked forward to on this particular walk was the snack breaks – and the pasta Chef Massimo had made the night before at the rustic cabin using cheese from a grocery store.
It was actually delicious.
The best and most exciting part of the hike happened after we had walked about 13 miles (21–22 kilometers).
I casually mentioned to Massimo that my body doesn’t really enjoy walking more than 20–22 kilometers a day.
Maybe 25.
But that’s it.
My body, at this point, has established a union. There are rules and there are limits.
A few minutes after I made this declaration, we heard a tractor approaching.
We stepped to the side of the road to let it pass.
And just as it was about to go by, Massimo stuck out his hitchhiker thumb.
The farmer stopped.
I was confused. I thought Massimo was kidding. We had not discussed hitchhiking. I assumed he was simply entertaining himself at my expense.
Then the farmer nodded toward the back of the tractor as if to say, “Get on.”
He lowered the automatic hitch.
Massimo looked at me and said: “Come on. You said you’re tired. Let’s go for a ride.”
Then he turned around, climbed onto the freshly cut firewood filling the wagon, and settled in like this was a perfectly normal form of transportation – but probably illegal in many countries.
Apparently, after seven weeks of hiking, we have evolved. We are no longer hikers. We are hikers with transportation options.
Talk about a God wink.
We were becoming professionals at both manifesting AND hitchhiking in various modes of transportation.
And honestly?
It was fantastic.
We had so much fun on that two-kilometer ride, laughing about how lazy we have become and how, somewhere along the way, our trip has quietly transitioned from walking across Romania to occasionally getting other people to drive us across Romania.
We would probably be fantastic contenders on The Amazing Race at this point.
When the farmer dropped us off about two kilometers later in town, he told Massimo – in Italian – that he had worked in Napoli for about a year, as well as in Germany.
He was apparently quite worldly for a farmer in the middle of nowhere.
We thanked him and continued walking.
For approximately 59 meters.
Because 59 meters later, we found a bar.
Sadly, it wasn’t open. But naturally, we stopped anyway and had a snack.
Because you can never have too many snacks.
Especially after an exhausting two-kilometer tractor ride with chunks of wood and splinters pinching your buttocks.
We continued a couple more kilometers (walking) down the road, the sun beating directly onto our faces, when Massimo did it again.
He stuck out his thumb.
A young guy driving a gray Audi pulled over and picked us up.
At this point, I didn’t even question it.
We were on a roll. Why stop now?
We were no longer hitchhiking.
We were conducting a field study.
Our research question: How little can we actually walk and still technically call ourselves hikers?
Turns out this young guy had also worked in Napoli.
I started wondering if he was somehow related to our new farmer friend.
He drove us the last couple of kilometers into town and dropped us off at the magazin – a little shop in the middle of the village.
Naturally, we needed another snack.
Let me tell you… Hitchhiking can be exhausting.
Inside the store, we began selecting our gluttonous little rewards: ice cream, potato chips, and Coca-Cola.
You know. The traditional diet of elite endurance athletes.
At some point, I said Massimo’s name.
A young guy – maybe 18 or 19 – wearing a black shirt and black sunglasses suddenly perked up.
“Parli italiano?”
And that was it.
The floodgates opened. Italian words started flying out of their mouths so quickly that everyone was shocked, including the confused girl behind the counter.
After a long conversation with Massimo’s new friend, Alessio, we picked up our bags and prepared to leave.
Alessio looked at both of us and asked – in English:
“You want a ride to the guesthouse?”
Then he pointed to the guy standing next to him.
“He’s the owner.”
Do we want a ride? What do we look like? A couple of schmucks who walk more than they hitchhike?
Of course we wanted a ride.
And that is the story of how we hitchhiked three times in one day, including on a pile of firewood.
A couple hours later, Costin arrived at our accommodation (that had a pool that none of us swam in) and couldn’t believe the journey we had after we parted ways during the hike.
Like a respectable hiker – he walked.
We will be giving a Ted Talk later this month about how to survive a hike by hitchhiking.
Hike #2: Prigor to Petnic
After breakfast, we said goodbye to our lovely guesthouse owner/Uber driver and started walking.
Yes.
Walking.
We were determined to prove that yesterday’s three hitchhiking episodes were merely an anomaly and that we were, in fact, still legitimate hikers.
We weren’t but thirty minutes into the hike when we were accosted – very politely – by a woman standing in her driveway.
She was speaking in Romanian and started chatting with Costin.
Massimo and I kept walking.
We rounded a bend and never saw Costin again – well, until much later in the day.
About fifteen minutes later, a van pulled up next to us and a man said something in Romanian. Massimo basically responded that we don’t speak Romanian, how about Italian or English.
The man responded in perfect Italian and offered us a ride. We politely declined and then the man’s wife leaned forward and started speaking. She was the same woman from the driveway.
Apparently, we had missed the turn for the trail and we were off course. She had sent Costin back on track but we were too busy walking and talking to notice.
They offered us a ride, again, and they were so excited to speak Italian with Massimo that they practically threw us in their kidnapper van and shut the door.
The woman started talking a mile a minute. Turns out she works two months on and two months off in Italy as a caregiver for an elderly gentleman.
And in a wild coincidence she works only 20 kilometers from Massimo’s house.
And in an even a more bizarre twist of circumstance, she works for a man with the same last name as Massimo – no relation.
Oh, they were so happy to meet us – correction: to meet Massimo…I don’t think they even realized I was in the car. So basically we are either doing the Lord’s work by accepting these free rides or we’ve become international tourism ambassadors for both Italy and the US.
I’m not sure what my official qualifications are, but I’m already accepting applications for my diplomatic passport.
The nice couple said “Ciao, ciao,” and dropped us off about 12 kilometers down the road in a small village near the trail – leaving us with only 8 kilometers to go.
We are just moving right along on this ol’ map.
As we walked through the tiny village, a man and woman were walking out of their house and stopped us to ask in a polite way – “What the hell are you doing here?” and then proceed to invite us into their home for drinks and some snacks.
I mean, we are international ambassadors now, we can’t be turning down an opportunity to offer goodwill and conversation with the locals. We have work to do.
The couple are pediatric doctors and surgeons who live in Timișoara and were at their weekend home that the man’s mother lives in full time.
They had so many questions about the VT – which we were happy to answer as part of our ambassadorship – as they served us cookies, Pepsi and Mama’s homemade apple pastries.
We visited for about thirty minutes and told them we needed to carry on – we had a lot of walking ahead of us, not. Before we parted ways, they gave us a Pepsi bottle full of homemade moonshine – that looked and tasted more like gasoline – and took a photo with us.
I think our work here was successful.
Diplomacy is hard work.
Someone has to do it.
We took our time finishing the walk. We didn’t want to arrive to early – the guesthouse owner may think we hitchhiked or something.
After all, we have a reputation to protect.
In a hat tip to our new careers, I’ve added one of Dolly Parton’s hits to this video.
Much love & gratitude. Namaste 🙏
If you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you’d like and share it.
