When is a castle more like a palace? When it's called Peles Castle of course (strictly speaking pronounced more like "Pel-esh", but that's just semantics). The owner of the apartment we are AirBnB'ing has set us up with a friend of his to be our private driver for a couple of half day outings which is great. We had considered doing it all in one day - but given that it took us all morning to have breakfast, shower, get dressed, pack lunch and get ourselves ready ...

Today (Monday) we had our first success in actually getting a Bucuresti cabbie to drive us somewhere (remember we've been here 10 days). With our packs packed and ourselves booted and spurred, we only had to ask four (4!) cabbies to take us to the central railway station. The trouble is they are paid shockingly. 1.39 lei per kilometre... 30 cents perhaps? So in rebellion they generally sit about all day smoking and refusing fares unless they are more or less hea...

The week that was... in the fridge of Europe. We arrived shortly after a massive cold snap hit most of Europe. Fortunately it was a few days after the metre of snow that had buried Bucharest. Our week started with nighttime lows of minus 17 degrees and right up to a positively tropical 10 degrees on Saturday. The cycle of freeze/melt/repeat appears to have stuck on the 'Melt' stage and it was a huge relief to go out today for a long walk up the boulevards to th...

So. What has 17 degrees got to do with leaving Spain and arriving in Romania. Well might you ask. When we flew out of Malaga last night it was 17 degrees outside. When we landed in Bucharest (20 minutes early... we think the pilot was a Romanian cabbie in a previous life), it was MINUS 17 DEGREES! It did look a bit nippy from the plane window when we touched down and taxied past massive snow banks, so we took our cue from the locals who were shimmying into hat...

The time has come, the walrus said... to depart the Schengen Zone (3 months out of every six might have seemed reasonable when the borderless Schengen zone was five countries... now that it's 26 and the vast majority of Europe... 3 months seems miserly). But depart it we must, in order to have a month up our sleeve for our "Northern Lights etc" jaunt prior to returning to Australia. We did the last of the packing, cleaning, laundry, making up the house today. W...