La Grande Vadrouille ENG

Spring has arrived! 🌸 The sun is out, temperatures are rising, and nature is slowly but surely waking up—to our greatest delight 🌞. It actually inspired us to do a bit of decorating in the van.  Jérôme named her Rosalie. He talks to her every day and, so far, she’s proving to be a very good travel companion 😊. So it was in this springtime atmosphere that we continued our exploration of Transylvania, stopping in charming towns and villages, going on a few hikes, and visiting several sites—including one that’s quite out of the ordinary: the Turda Salt Mine (Salina Turda). It’s a former salt mine that was exploited from the Middle Ages until 1932. There are several salt deposits in the region, believed to have formed 13.5 million years ago when the area was covered by a shallow sea in a tropical climate. In Turda, the salt layer can reach a thickness of up to 1,200 meters 😲. Over the centuries, people kept digging and digging to extract this precious resource, creating an impressi...

After leaving Turkey, we headed north along the Black Sea coast and quickly made a first observation: the Black Sea isn’t black!! So why is it called the Black Sea? There seem to be several hypotheses. One of them is that for the Turks, each cardinal point was associated with a color, and black represented the north. Since the sea is indeed located to the north of Turkey geographically, that explanation works fine for us, sold 👍. So we followed the coast toward the black/north, crossing Bulgaria fairly quickly. Not that there’s nothing to see there, but since it’s impossible to go everywhere, we chose to focus more on Romania. Shortly after crossing the border shortly after noon, we stopped to eat and had a feeling there was a good restaurant nearby. How did we know? By seeing families getting out of their cars with Granny and Grandpa. Some signs never lie, if you take your elderly parents out, surely it's in a good place 😂. And we were absolutely not disappointed by this HUGE r...

  This has been one of the main descriptions of Istanbul for centuries. Looking at the world map, it is easy to understand why. Located between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, straddling Europe and Asia, Istanbul has always been a crossroads of worlds, cultures, religions, and trade. The end of the Silk Road, the terminus of the Orient Express, the end of Europe and the beginning of Asia… the end or the beginning? Is 1453 the date of the fall of Constantinople or the conquest by the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II? It depends on which side you stand on—and also on the journey 😊. For us, Istanbul marks an ending: the end of our Turkish and Asian chapter and our return to Europe. Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul—three names for the same city that say a lot about its history. First Byzantium, the Greek city; then Constantinople, renamed by the Roman emperor Constantine; and finally Istanbul, as named by the Ottomans. As one might imagine, its history is long, tumultuous, and sometim...