A Brasov bday

After a hefty night trying to sleep with a dog consistently farting next to me, I woke to E on her 21st birthday and went to work trying to figure out something nice to do for the day. It's her first time away for a birthday and for a 21st, I wanted to make sure she enjoyed herself. Being an outdoorsy kinda girl not into big material things, I had the options as going horseriding (although we needed the horses brought over from the paddock first), camping or maybe sightseeing in Brasov, an hour or two down the road.

We settled on a road trip towards Brasov, to catch one of the 'Dracula castles' in Bran as well as Brasov town. Jumping into Old Red, we spluttered our way onto the main road and quickly settled into a nice pace right on the speed limit so every other crazed driver could race around us. Fine with me. Heading to Bran, we went through Rasnov first and climbed the hill to the mountain-top fortress which we read was closed at the bottom but still thought would be a good view. It was a good view, except the town wasn't that spectacular. So we went back down in a slight hurry to avoid the rain and - dammit the dog just farted again - went to a restaurant for a pizza.

Over an hour later, of which about 10 mins was actually eating (slowest service ever and smallest pizza ever), we were back on the road and heading to Bran. A much nicer town, albeit much too touristy for my liking, we headed with the throngs of camera-clicking foreign-tongued people to the castle. It was a nice castle, well preserved, but I just can't stand being in the tourist crowd so we quickly observed the rooms and scooted out. Also, there was little connection to Dracula so all the hub bub around it was pure marketing, very annoying. Had some lovely views as well so I'm glad I went up there. Was the most expensive thing we did all day, about £5 to get in (whoooooa nelly haha).

Chomping on some icecream and choc bars (except for me, I stupidly bought a rum-flavoured, dark choc one because I couldn't read the packet), we headed to Brasov next and wandered around (seeing the Black Church, Black Tower and White Tower) there for a while before finding a place to eat. The town is beautiful, the old section at least, easily one of my favourite European cities. And I was almost going to say the first time I'd not heard any Aussie accents, but alas twas not to be. There was a table of bogans about 5m from us as we ate. We stuffed ourselves full, courtesy of H's pocket-money, and I found an oil burner set to give to E (if nothing else, to kill the stench of dog fart).

The way back from Brasov was definitely the most interesting part, given that none of us had thought to figure out which city we needed to follow the signs for. After doing a massive detour, we finally found a restaurant with an English-speaking employee, dodged the drunkard on the way in and got good directions. They began with, "you have to go down this really dangerous road next to a river and all this rubble and holes"... great. It wasn't so bad because not many other cars were out so I could try and dodge the holes (not completely successful) and L could piss next to the car without an audience.

We finally arrived back probably about 3 hours later, but we still had smiles on our faces. We'd already been through the full gamut of emotions anyway so it's all we could do. Before we went inside our guest house to bed, we tried to feed the dogs, one of which had gotten loose and went absolutely nuts when the other tried to steal her food. Massive fight between two massive dogs, I was trying to break it up (hectic) and eventually it stopped when they rolled under a tractor.

Today the young male dog's nose is all puffy with a deep cut so I called H and he said to inject it with antibiotics. Turns out I'm pretty shit at that and I'm not quite sure how much went in to the actual dog, but tomorrow is another dog so fingers crossed.

We have a ride for four guests today, which should be entertaining. None of them can really ride so it'll be slow but hopefully someone will do something stupid and make me laugh haha... It'll probably be me actually.