A tale of Wanda, the Wandering Van....

Well, the journey to Moldova took a little longer than expected! - by the end of it we had spent more than 41 hours in the van and travelled through five different countries, stopping off for the night in Hungary and Romania before finally arriving in Moldova on April 1st.

Toni is in the van!!

The adventure began in the Czech Republic, where we got stopped by the police and Toni got taken into this van - turns out we hadn't paid our road tax...were given a fine and sent on our way...!

Slovakia presented us with no problems and we drove on to Hungary...We arrived in Budapest in good time, but our google map did not give us clear directions to our destination so we spent around two hours driving round Budapest and the surrounding area, talking to many people along the way, trying to find the address we needed...Finally, we arrived at the right address, only to find that we were in the wrong city!! Six hours later we arrived at the Csernus family home for dinner - and then spent the next day at Istvans house.

Istvan gave us a tour of Budapest by night!

The last stop on our journey was Romania, and, all was going well here, until we had to use our google map again!! This time however, we thought we would be wise and paid a taxi driver to lead us to our 'villa.' Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all as we ended up waiting in the van outside an abandoned orthodox church for the owner of the villa to turn up - only 3 hours late this time!!

Turns out, we weren't really staying in a villa...like the name suggested, but instead in a random apartment where we all had to squeeze into the tiny kitchen as it was the only place that we were allowed to eat! As the owner told us 'we were VERY lucky to stay in the apartment' even though the boys had to sleep on the floor in the lounge!

Spent the next day in Brasov before setting off on the last leg of the journey - Romania to Moldova...by now we had given up looking for nice places to stop and eat and just stopped on the side of the road....

The end of our journey was in sight...we crossed the Romanian border without any problems and thought that we were in Moldova when we saw another border and realised that we had celebrated too early - we had only managed to leave Romania and had not actually entered Moldova yet!!....At the border there was no problem with Hannah's visa....however, they were not happy with Wanda...Turns out that we needed a separate form to prove that we were allowed to drive the van, so, we were sent back to Romania where, after a couple of hours, several phonecalls to Belgium and a visit to two slightly dodgy internet cafes...we headed back to the border to try again....After about two hours, and a slightly scary time where we thought the border guard had either lost our passports or given them out to some random Moldovans, we were allowed through!! All that was left now was the dark and rainy drive to Chisinau on a Moldovan road (which means no sign posts, no lights and not a lot of tarmac!!)

so...five days later, we arrived safely in Moldova! Praise God for an eventful, but safe, journey!!

Wanda did us proud! - she got us all the way from Germany to Moldova without any problems. However, she is a little sick right now - please pray that we can find out what is wrong with her and fix her during our stay here...