What a long day we had yesterday.

It began easily enough, with our driver picking us up right on time to take us to the train station. They don't serve food on the train, so we bought KFC (and yes, that's what you think it is) to take with us.

The train arrived, we found our car/seats--we were in a car with seats that face each other, two and two. No one ever joined us, so we had the ability to put our feet up on the opposite seats, which made the long ride better.

The distance between Bucharest and Sofia isn't that far-takes about 6 hours by car to drive, but the train stops LOTS of times and it took a really long time to cross the border. First, we had to surrender our passports on the Romanian side, and I have to say that this was more than a little nerve wracking. Especially so when we saw the man who had just collected them get off the train! However, he finally brought them back and they'd been stamped as leaving Romania. Of course, this now meant a stop on the Bulgarian side for a stamp entering that country which took about another 45 minutes.

The ride was pretty uneventful other than once when a drunk man got on and plopped down in the seat opposite me (Rich had gone to another car to get some fresh air), and started trying to flirt w me, rambling on in some language I couldn't understand. One of my fellow passengers went and got Rich, and then the guy started hitting on a young girl (20's) that was next to us. He was so drunk he could barely stand up, and several men jumped up and sort of wrestled him off the girl and told him to leave. He wandered down to another car and we saw him get off at the next stop. Such drama!! It was nice to see strangers come together, though, in that instance.

We finally arrived into Sofia 11 hours after we had boarded--it was a little after 11:00 pm at this point. We managed to find our driver/Airbnb host, Petra, and were at the apartment in no time.

Petra drives a taxi and gives tours of the city, so we may ask him for one later. We are both tired from that journey yesterday, though, so it may be a few days before we do anything much.

The apartment is small, and probably feels even more so after the large one in Bucharest. However, it's got all we need and even has a computer with a printer, so we may try to load the photos from our phone onto a flash drive.

It's forecast to rain for the next several days--looks like our good weather may have come to an end!