Figure 8 On A Bike

After struggling to meet our winter sports ambitions in Romania, Susan and I were wishing for a few last days of decent skiing in Bansko, one of the largest ski resorts in Bulgaria. We hauled our bags up out of the cave apartment into the bright sunshine, and despite the mid-morning warmth in Sofia the slopes of Vitosha mountain to the south still shone white with snow. We remained hopeful that the online reports of a decent snowpack up high would bear out and that, even without any powder, some nice, consistent pistes would hold on against the heat. Our bus to Bansko (there is a train but true to stereotypes the Bulgarian train takes longer than the bus) didn't leave until about lunchtime, so despite Susan's antsy-ness I dawdled in the apartment and we left about 10 minutes later than intended. This wouldn't have mattered much, except that finding the bus that goes to Bansko turned out to be a bit of a scavenger hunt. First, we'd asked our taxi driver to drop us off...

At this point in the trip we were feeling a little discouraged, a little gray, a little tired of packing, and a little ready to relax. We couldn't quite start this second round in Brașov relaxing; however, as we had to check out of the hotel and check into the Airbnb where we had left our stuff. Our host wasn't getting back to us, so when we checked out of our hotel, we used the codes from the last time to get into the complex. We snatched some shoes from our pile of stuff in the laundry room and left our mountaineering gear in the pile. Unburdened, we headed out for another day of sightseeing in Brașov. We checked out some places we hadn't seen during our first stay in Brașov. Like Rope street which claims to be Europe's narrowest alley. We enjoyed the street art and graffiti before heading towards Biserica Ortodoxa Sfântul Nicolae and the First Roman School. It was steadily raining and we were looking forward to hiding inside the museum. Alas, when we arrived...

After our string of city days we were looking forward to our time in Sinaia where we had a very nice apartment booked. Sinaia is a small town in Romania's Bucegi Mountains. To get there we experienced our first Romanian train. We had been warned that Romanian trains were old and slow and not up to European standards. To us Americans they were marvels of public transit, though we could see the complaint that much of the infrastructure in the country dated to the communist era and was in sore need of investment. There were no indicators of which stop we were at so we had to use Ben's phone GPS to anticipate which stop we needed to get off at. The station was small and cute and we managed to order a taxi to take us the short distance to our place up the hill. It was raining, which was depressing as we wanted snow. We took the day to run grocery errands and the following day we spent relaxing in the apartment and planning future parts of the trip. Rainy Sinaia

Karakol is a cute little town at the head of Issyk-Kul Lake. In the summer it is a bustling tourist spot, and in the winter it hosts a ski resort. Most of the tourists that we ran into were internal tourists mostly coming from Bishkek. The downside to Karakol is the smog. For such a small town it had worse air quality than Almaty and every evening it seemed to get really bad as many people seemed to heat their homes with coal or wood burning stoves. We also never did figure out the industry there but there were a few very short smoke stacks in town that would send some noxious fumes into neighboring apartment complexes in the evenings. Ah fresh mountain air! View of Karakol from the ski resort

It's not the capital (partly due to the major earthquake fault just a few kilometers away), but Almaty is the biggest city and by far the most metropolitan area of Kazakhstan. It didn't really exist until the early 20th century, and expanded greatly during Kazakhstan's time under the USSR, so all the construction is relatively new and most of it distinctly Soviet. The city takes its name from the Russian word for apple, "elma", and the plentiful nearby orchards combine with its cultural significance to fuel its reputation as "The Big Apple" of Kazakhstan. The Alatau mountains towering south of Almaty

We left Dr. Aslan's nice hotel and flew to Erzurum Türkiye. We were unsure about the place we had booked here as it had zero reviews and two different addresses on Booking.com. We messaged to ask what to tell the taxi driver and she called and talked to the driver to get us where we needed to go. This place was BIG. It had an extra bedroom and a living room. We moved our stuff in and quickly had to get to the grocery store as this place was lacking in some basics like toilet paper - which I can forgive in a culture that doesn't use it...but there also wasn't any hand soap...We were looking at staying at this place for about 3 weeks so it wasn't a huge deal to pick up some stuff as we probably would have run out during the stay anyway. The place needed a handyman though and there were a lot of small things that were NOT great for a long stay. Oh well, live and learn. It was above a grocery store and that was awesome! After so many weeks of having limited access ...