After touring the 3rd modern castle of the trip, we made our way to Brașov where I would be staying for most of the remainder of my time in Romania. Brașov county is stretched out along a fairly flat valley area which is surrounded by the Southern Carpathian Mountains. From here I would be able to visit various sites around Transylvania. The first half of the trip was fairly briskly paced moving and seeing lots of different places. In Brașov, the pace slowed a bit as I didn’t need to keep changing lodging, and we were able to just take in some highlights. The Airbnb was actually a small apartment in a relatively new apartment building development, so I was able to get a feel of what the typical people were living like. Unbeknownst to us, Maddy’s friend Doina lived in the same development and she actually spied Maddy’s car as we were driving around looking for the building where my Airbnb was.
I survived my queasy sickness at the beginning of the trip, now Maddy was suffering from a bad back and was a bit under the weather. Friday morning started out at a very relaxed pace, taking care of a few local errands including exchanging some currency. Then we headed out for what is probably the singular, iconic, tourist destination in Romania, Bran Castle — sometimes referred to as Dracula’s Castle. On the way, we stopped by a very nice restaurant D.O.R. (Delicious. Organic. Romanesc.) that had great food, a wonderful view, and a tree growing in the middle of the dining room.
We got to Bran in the later afternoon, and it was filled with people as I’m told it always is. Upon subsequent reading, I learned that the actual connection of Bran Castle with Vlad Țepeș (Vlad III Dracula, Vlad the Impaler) is more loose and its depiction as Dracula’s home was likely a marketing ploy developed during the communist era when they were trying to develop tourism. Nevertheless, it certainly looks the part, and was definitely worth visiting. Interestingly, the tour of the castle didn’t really play up the Dracula angle, focusing mostly on the recent royal residents. It did, however, have some references to Dracula in the movies and literature, and there was an additional tour where they had collected various medieval torture devices. In contrast, at the base of the hill leading up to the castle, there was a large collection of stalls aimed at tourist trinkets, and this place was all about Dracula and vampire souvenirs. The castle itself, whose origins date back to the 13th century, has a very genuine medieval look and feel, with a crumbled rock structure at it’s base that easily fulfills the image of the home of the king of the vampires. It was the most interesting of the castles I saw on this trip. 
The interior passages were small and narrow to enhance it role as a fortress and defense in fighting. We did the two additional side tours, the torture device collection, and something called the Time Tunnel, which was a way to exit the castle which provided an elevator down a shaft to a tunnel at the base which was used as an escape route in ancient days, but now was fitted with a bunch of audio-visual multimedia features that was kind of fun to see.
After the tour we had a snack at a cafe at the base of the hill. I was glad to head out before it was completely dark when the monsters might be coming out.
