Saturday 25th May Our hotel is the Fronius Residence, a 17th century house with a huge, impressively furnished bedroom with a vaulted ceiling. It is in the walled town set above the new town down around the river. After a leisurely breakfast we were led around the town to have the sights explained. The main square is dominated by a tall clock tower & the Lutheran church. On one side there is the house in which Vlad Tepes, 'the Impaler' was born in 1431...

Thursday 23rd May After breakfast we walked to the cable car station arriving well before it opened at 9.30am. The car took us to the top of the ridge & we had some fine views of Brasov on the way. The top was a bit of a disappointment as the viewing platform was closed & the surrounding trees limited our sightseeing from the ridge. We descended on the car & set off past the Weavers' Bastion to see St Nicholas's Cathedral in the Romanian part o...

Tuesday 21st May Left the hotel at 9 am but the minibus was held up in traffic, so we got away at about 9.20 & crawled out of Bucharest at snail's pace for 15km. Eventually we cleared the city & drove past the world's oldest oil refinery & an abandoned power station from the Communist era at Ploiesti. We also later passed a couple of modern oil donkeys pumping it out of the huge plain. A nearby city was the target of American bombers in WW2 to k...

Friday 17th May Anna took us to the airport for the 10.55pm plane to Doha, Qatar. Saturday 18th May The 2 fights were uneventful & on time but were somewhat tiring. We were met at Bucharest airport & taken, with Pam, also on the tour, into the city to our hotel & arrived at about 1.30 pm local time. After a shower and a rest we went for a walk along the poorly cobbled streets of the neighbourhood & went into an old Orthodox church with fi...