moving nightly | 8 nights | from $2,120 per person
Transylvania Vacation Package: Eight Nights, Eight Rooms
A driving loop through fortified villages at the rate of one a night. This Transylvania vacation package puts you in a different room almost every evening, and the driving between them is slower than the distances look.
What moving nightly means on this trip
- Beds across the trip
- Eight rooms across eight nights: seven family guesthouses and one nine-room country hotel, each with a private bathroom. Six sit in villages under 900 people, two in walled towns.
- How the bag moves
- You move it yourself, room to car and car to room, every single morning. Six of the eight properties put you up one or two flights of stairs with no elevator and no porter.
- The longest single move
- Day six, Sighisoara to the Apuseni foothills: 118 miles, four hours and ten minutes at the wheel with two stops, on roads where 35 mph is a normal running average.
- Time actually spent moving
- About 21 hours of driving across the 780-mile loop, plus roughly five hours of loading, parking and checking in. That is close to a fifth of your waking time on the trip.
- What stays in the room
- Nothing stays anywhere. The room is empty and the car is loaded by 9:30 most mornings, so the day pack with phone, water and a warm layer rides up front rather than under the luggage.
- What the rhythm buys, and what it costs
- You get inside eight different villages instead of taking day trips out of one, and you eat at eight different tables. The cost is that you never learn a place, and an hour of every evening goes to unpacking, a sink wash and repacking.
- Who this rhythm does not suit
- Anyone who would rather not drive abroad should skip this one, and so should anyone who cannot carry a suitcase up a narrow staircase without a handrail. Four of the eight days include an hour of switchbacks, which settles it for travelers who get carsick.
The last row loses this desk bookings and it stays on the page anyway. A rhythm that does not suit you is far cheaper to discover here than on the fourth morning.
Where the figure goes
- Eight nights: seven family guesthouses and one nine-room country hotel, every room with its own bathroom, breakfast included on all eight mornings.
- A compact rental car held for nine days, collected and returned in Cluj, unlimited mileage, second driver added at no charge.
- A printed route book with 22 marked stops and written directions for each leg, since cell coverage drops out for 20 to 30 minutes at a stretch between villages.
- Admission paid ahead at six fortified church precincts, including the three where a neighbor keeps the key and has to be telephoned first.
- Two walks of about 90 minutes with a guide who works in English: one in a walled town, one in a village of 420 people.
- Dinner reserved on the four nights when the village has a single kitchen and it stops taking orders early.
What sits outside the figure
- Flights into Cluj and home out of Bucharest, priced on their own. Round trip from Colorado Springs has been running $900 to $1,290 per person, higher in July.
- Fuel, roughly $100 to $135 for the full loop, plus about $20 for the road vignette.
- Lunches, and the four dinners we have not reserved, at $12 to $25 per person.
- The security deposit the rental company holds at its own counter, usually $250 to $600, released after the car goes back.
- Any night you decide to stay put. A second night in one place means dropping a village, and we will tell you which one it has to be.
What it costs
from $2,120 per person
- What it covers
- 8 nights, one rental car for nine days, eight guesthouse rooms on a driving loop.
- What it assumes
- Two people to a room, unless the seven rows above say otherwise for your case.
- What pushes it up
- Which month you pick, which grade of room, how late you leave it, and how far the beds sit from each other.
- When it hardens
- The day it is written down with an operator named on it. Before that it marks the bottom of a range and claims nothing else.
Settlement happens between you and the operator, on their system. Nothing is collected on these pages and no card reaches this desk.
Which months hold up
Late May through the end of June, and the first three weeks of September, are when this route is at its easiest. Light lasts until nine, the gravel sections are dry, and all eight properties are open.
November through March is the wrong end of the year. Four of the rooms close for the winter, dark falls around 4:40pm, and the mountain stretches are salted rather than plowed. Driving one of those at night, at the end of a 118-mile day, is not something we will book for you.
The weeks we argue people out of run from mid-July to the third week of August. Village rooms hit 88 F by late afternoon and only two of the eight have air conditioning, so a Transylvania vacation package at this rhythm turns into eight nights of poor sleep. Easter weekend is the other one: half the kitchens shut and the churches keep their own schedule that week.
Still open at the point you confirm
Four things get pinned down when you say yes. Room grade in the two walled towns, where a courtyard room runs $30 to $60 a night above a standard double. Which half of the loop takes the spare afternoon, the southern villages or the Apuseni foothills, because there is not time for both. Whether day seven adds the salt mine detour, which is 55 extra miles and $9 a head at the gate. And the start date, which we push toward a Tuesday or Wednesday pickup, since the Monday morning line at the car counter has been running 40 minutes long.