Romania - Day 3 & 4

Day 3 was a day of driving for me, I dropped JP of at the airport so he could go home to the hospital and then did the fuel run for everyone but things got way more interesting on the night time. It was a proper party fest with a couple of local Romanian guys competing with some of the UK boys in a drinking competition. It ended very messily with one of the Romanian boys asleep on the side of the road and another now on Facebook drooling in the car as he was driven home! Meanwhile the UK boys carried on until 5am when they finally crashed but then had some kind of flood in their room at 6 am to get them up again!

I had a good scare when I checked on Roxy, our dog, after dinner, her face was very swollen and she was extremely lethargic, not interested in food, drink or some fuss which is not like her. I panicked a bit but remembered that one of the Romanian lads was a vet, so asked him to examine her, he thought she'd been bitten by a snake and was having a reaction. So she had some Piriton and I had to keep an eye on her for the next couple of hours. Overnight the swellings all went down and she was herself again so that was one to be aware of for the future!

Day 4 was a cloudy, wet and misty day, but once Gareth & Matt surfaced from their alcohol induced sleep, it was riding time! (Albeit a little erratically on the trails at first!)

We headed up the piste to a really steep uphill on loose rock which eventually took us to a rolling ride across a ridge and down to the bowl at the head of a valley where some mountain farms were situated. A brief chat with one of the farmers and we joined back into a piste which then dropped back into the forest. Some lovely sweeping trails followed as we dropped down, mixing with a few heavily water damaged sections that had us in the rock strewn gully and on the sides as we picked our way down.

I struggled all day on the steep uphills, these are my weakest form of riding skill and it really showed today. Both Matt & Steve helped me loads and I rode Matt's 2 stroke for a fair bit today. I had no problems with his bike other than my choice of lines so that tells me I'm too heavy handed with the 350 throttle!

We were looking for the hotel where one of the lads from the previous evening was supposed to be, but none if us could remember what it was called, so we dropped into one of the few ski areas in Romania, (including passing through a building site as new properties were being built)

Not finding the hotel left us carrying on back into the forest, where we bypassed a shepherd and his flock, dropping steeply into another heavily water damaged trail. These take a little time to traverse but are good fun. More sweeping trails took down to a tarmac road and a lovely little village which we passed through en route to an on old ruined tower on a very prominent hilltop. The view from this was beautiful with the whole valley opening up at our feet and also being one of the first views we'd had all day due to the low cloud. The climb to get that view was a corker, steep, rutted and in the high fern... great stuff!!

From here we rounded off the day with a section through another forest but this time, it was really technical, with some orange KTM markers in the trees, so maybe it was something to do with the upcoming Romaniacs but it could just as easily have been another ultra technical enduro race. Who knows. This led us back to a flat piste, now full of puddles as it was raining quite hard and eventually back to our accommodation, beer and some dinner.

Another fab day out in the Romanian mountains