he Carpathian Mountains cover central and northern Romania. The Transylvanian Plain covers the central part of the arch that the mountains form as they run from northwest to east to south west and cover about a third of the country’s area. The mountains are beautiful as the picture at right shows. There are numerous rivers and streams and the roads all tend to follow them. Riding in the mountains was very picturesque.

Unfortunately the weather did not cooperate fully on the days we rode through these wonderful mountains and things are a bit overcast and dull. But, the spectacular beauty of the mountains cannot be denied. Earlier in the day we encountered the small village pictured at left. This picture also shows some of the farming activities. Notice the hay spread out to dry on the racks in the fields. We first encountered this when we were in Slovenia but see that the same method is used here.

Verna had a conversation in the parking lot of a motel where we stayed one night as we were packing in the morning with a man who is from Romania but now lives in Toronto, Canada. He suggested that we take a different route today than we had planned - one that would take us through a narrow gorge. We followed his advise and are glad we did -the picture at the right is from the gorge. We could not find this gorge listed on our map or in our tour book. Tourists are beginning to discover it though - we say this because just around the bend at the distant part of the picture the road widened just enough for people to have constructed numerous wooden huts (all of fresh new pine) form which people were selling lots of souvenirs.

We also encountered numerous trucks and trailers that were loaded with bee hives. In some cases, as can be seen in the picture below, hives are removed from the trailer or truck and placed on the ground. But most hives are left on the truck or trailer. In the trailer on the right side of the picture you can see that the roof to the trailer has doors that open so bees can have easy access to the hives on the inside of the trailer as well. This way the bees can be easily relocated to whatever area happens to be in bloom given the time of year.

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