weekend in Piatra Craiului

DSC04965.jpg

me doing my first-ever rappel

I have returned from a very active weekend in Piatra Craiului, and I am still nursing my wounds. I went there with Serban and Andreea – the only people left from a larger group which slowly dissolved. The plan was to do 2 days of mountain climbing with a guide. The weekend proved to be immensely fun, scary, painful and pleasant…

Highlights include:

  • me being the lunch and dinner for a colony of flies – I have on average 15 bites per leg or arm. And they itch like crazy!!!
  • laughing to tears when Serban was scared by a dog sneezing
  • getting terrorized after falling 20cm while climbing a nasty rock formation (I was safely secured…)
  • finally managed to descend a cliff in rappel

A very nice weekend which got me thinking about trying a basic course of mountain-climbing. Enjoy the pictures!

promotions, websites, and other news

While I still haven’t processed the last batch of photos from the Helsinki trip (the ones from the Sveaborg / Suomenlinna island), I did browse the net and found a few interesting links and newsworthy items.

The great news is that lazy-blogger Cristi restarted writing on his blog. A new look, a new language, and a flurry of posts in just a few days – I see great potential! And it’s said the third time’s a charm, right? So, blog.cristianradu.com is reborn!

I also read  a new photography blog (new for me, somewhat), where the latest highlight are photos taken in Iceland. Brilliant images! Pay a visit to La vie en gris – warning: it might give you a strong urge to travel and see the world through the camera lens.

The last blog-link for today is Go Backpacking, which I found by reading @Lonelyplanet. A lot of interesting stories, very well written and informative. The posts from a 15 months long trip around the world will probably keep me interested for a long time. An example of a very interesting post is “cost of a trip around the world“.

This week also saw the introduction of autumn special offers from a few airlines. KLM, Air France, MALEV and probably others started a new round of fighting for our travel budget.

KLM - highlights include round-trip to Amsterdam for 139 Euro, Air France – Paris for 149 Euro return. Malev has other interesting offers, a lot of them appearing as best buys in Skyscanner.

I will also return to the good habit of posting photos on the blog, but until then feel free to enjoy the photos an stories from the first links.

the Nordic adventure

IMG_0920.jpgA long time in the making, this post tells in short the trip I took to Helsinki and Tallinn. Thanks to a pretty interesting offer from Finnair (Finnish air carrier), I started toying with the idea of visiting Finland and maybe Sweden. I intended to travel 9 or 10 days, however when talking about travels with a colleague of mine we decided to attempt this together.

So a change of plans occurred (for the better I would say) and we ended up going a long weekend to Helsinki and do a day trip to Tallinn (in Estonia – the Baltic countries). It was a nice change of style for me to travel with other people (he he), and sharing the tasks (flight tickets, accommodation, planning,…) was pretty nice. Also this is one of the few trips from which I return with pictures of me :)

continue reading the Nordic adventure »