On this trip I’ve tried to try the cuisine from the region I’ve been in: Arancini, sea urchin, pigs ears, octopus, sprats, Champagne and Black Forest Cake to name a few.  But I’ve eaten so much seafood this last month I had to take a break from it all with a lovely pizza that turned my digestive tract in knots the next day.

Our trip can probably be divided into three parts, the migration south, lingering on the coast and now the long road home.  It took some amount of will to draw us off the Romanian Black Sea resorts because restaurants generally charge less than thirty quid for wine and three courses, the beer can be bought in two and a half litre bottles for a couple of Euros and campsites have been good quality, the pool at our last site being a particular highlight.

But we counted our remaining days and knew we had to get moving.  So, on a recommendation from one of the many Germans we’ve met, we headed North to the Danube Delta.  As we passed out of the urban areas, we shifted into a countryside I could only describe as bucolic.  I didn’t even know what the word meant this time last year but with each back road we took, the landscape became even more bucolical.  The fields of wheat and sunflowers stretched across the flat lands to the horizon and the scene was punctuated only by splattered colour from the endless wildflowers and the occasional dusty village dotted with headscarf wearing old ladies.

The Sea gave way to huge inland lakes and the fields finished where the land turned into marsh.

The worst part of our entire trip was getting up at 4:30 this morning but it soon became something very special when our boat left the dock and turned into one of the many tributaries of the Danube.  I’ve never been much of a bird watcher, so I won’t even pretend to be one now but we must have seen a hundred different varieties of bird.  Damselflies and Dragonflies kept pace with the boat, frogs sat perched over acres of water lilies, water snakes sunned themselves on branches as did turtles.

There was one other tourist boat out today and we were the only people on ours.

I don’t know why but I always felt that Romania was going to be a very special part of this trip, it has proven to be that and so much more, and we haven’t even made it to Transylvania yet.

I’d just said I wasn’t much of a twitcher but one bird I’ve seen a lot of the past two months are the storks.  We were thrilled to witness them building their nests in Alsace, elated to find them guarding over their eggs in Greece, delighted to see an extra two or three heads appear in each nest in Bulgaria and pleased to finally observe the chicks ready to fledge in Romania.

The storks have been as ever present on our journey as the poppies. After a month we now turn inland through the Carpathian Mountains with its brown bear population, on to the land of the undead and Vlad the Impaler.