Location, location, location

In the modern world, Transylvania carries mythical connotations. For many Westerners, it exists somewhere between Atlantis—pure fiction—and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon—proof that it existed can only be found on an ancient map in the back room of a musty bookshop specializing in pieces of archaic antiquity.
However, Transylvania is alive and well, as you can see from the map below, which looks like it comes from a child's coloring book but is actually from the Romanian Tourism site.

For those who followed our Zike-Bike journey, you know that before we moved to the mustard yellow zone, we used to live in the bright red section of Oltenia, in a little village called Obedin, near Craiova.
Mihai's father still lives there. He doesn't want to move in with us because he has too many animals and he likes sharing his house with them. (For now, he's doing well and we're keeping things status quo.)
Before the house turned into a petting zoo, we loved living in Obedin. The only drawback were the summers. Between mid-June and early September it gets hot— the kind of hot that makes you want to run for the hills, or, more specifically, the Carpathian Mountains/Transylvanian Alps.

Mihai's maternal grandmother lived in Transylvania. In fact, we now live on her property. I can't say we live in her house, although we tried to. In 2019, we thought we'd renovate a little and add some modern amenities like a bathroom (there was only an outhouse) but when the workers started hammering, the whole place collapsed.
So much for renovations.
In any case, Mihai inherited the property and that's how we ended up in Transylvania, in the village of Viștea de Jos. It's too small to show up on either of the maps above, but for reference, we're right between Sibiu and Brașov.
You can see that we're ensconced by the mountains which keeps things temperate, even in the months between June and September. You can also see that we're almost smack dab in the center of the country which is a convenient launching point for traveling. The downside is that no matter where we go, we have at least one section of mountain to cross which makes for slow (though mostly scenic) driving.
But life here is slow, and that's perfectly ok with me. If you like slow, you can come and hang out at 278 Principală and we can all be slow together for as long as you'd like. Or, if you only want a little bit of slowness, you can fly to pretty much anywhere in Europe and do exciting things and then take a quick and relatively cheap flight to visit us here in Transylvania.
Both Sibiu and Brașov are about an hour's drive from us and have airports which provide non-stop service to Munich, Milan, Vienna, London, Madrid, Crete, Rome, Heraklion, Antalya, Budapest and Naples.
Bucharest has non-stop flights to all of the major European and Middle East cities but it's a bit of haul for us—4 hours each way. The easiest thing is for us to get you with the train. But what would a trip to Europe be without at least one train ride?

As you can see, Romania isn't exactly in the center of Europe, it's like us, a little off on the fringes. Maybe Romania in general would like to be more in the thick of things, but we're ok being off the beaten path, in our obscure little village where the summers are cool.
Thank you for reading and I hope that wherever you are, you are enjoying your location, whether it's in the thick of it all, or over on the sidelines.
Be well.