Wednesday 28 August 2019 – River Cruise (Bucharest)

We had scheduled a 9am departure from the boat. There were four choices – 8:30am, 8:45am, 9:00am and 9:15am. The night before the Captain had made a joke about things they had heard from passengers over the years, with one being “what time does the 9am bus leave?”. Going by our experience the past few days, it was a valid question. The scheduled departure time had never been met and was always at least 15 minutes late in going. That changed today – 9:00am on the dot, we left!

Our bus ride was due to take about 1.5 hours to get to Bucharest, where we would transfer to the hotel for the remainder of our cruise. Again the sights along the way were interesting in that buildings they no longer needed were simply abandoned, rather than demolished.

We arrived into Bucharest and had a 15 minute pit stop at the hotel. We couldn’t check in yet (that would be 3pm), we had a bus tour to go on first. We went through the various sights of the city, with plenty of explanation along the way. On one of the passes through the city we went by the hotel. Nope, no chance to stop there. We were dropped off 1km down the road to go and find lunch instead. We would be picked up at 3pm.

Wandering through the streets we found a place to eat. The food took forever to arrive – it was ok though. About the time that we thought the food would come, we heard a plate smash – we joked that it was ours. Well, it was Mick’s. Everybody else’s came out then about 10 minutes later Mick got his. We thought we would never actually get to eat it before we needed to head back.

It was still boiling hot so we waited for the bus in the shade. We arrived back at the hotel (which was 1.2km walk up the road) after doing a 5km road trip to get there. We checked in and headed down to the pool area to check it out. I didn’t pack my togs but ended up buying some so we could get in the pool and cool off. It was very refreshing.

For dinner we ate a restaurant in the hotel – an Italian place. Again, the food was nice and tasty. Following dinner we went back to the room to sleep.