Benson Harris Wallace, Esq. (2.0): The Travel Archives Series - Spooky Eastern Europe and searching for Dracula

Warily checking in at the Hotel Castel Dracula, July 2012

I'm going to change direction for the next few weeks/months and work through a few of my as yet untold travel tales. Writing my "theories about life" type posts has been rewarding, but it's difficult to come up with new ideas every week, and the few that I do have left need some more time to ferment. I figure by the time I work my way through a decade of travel adventures, I'll have some more theories to publish :-)

That's not to say you'll be getting travel diary-style accounts of all my travel adventures since 2010 - that would require an entire year's worth of weekends - rather, I'll try to keep it to highlights, pictures with witty captions and the odd insight or travel tip about lesser-known destinations (and let's face it, there's a lot more web content competing for your attention than there was in 2006, so nobody has time to read my travel emails these days anyway).

Without further ado then, let's take a trip back to June 2012.

We signed the ownership papers for our brand new leased Citroen at a dealership near Frankfurt airport and were speeding down the Autobahn towards the Czech border within minutes; by lunchtime we were quaffing Czech Pilsener with goulash.

First beer of the trip

The aim of the trip was mostly to eat and drink our way through Eastern Europe, and judging by the route map, I'd say we succeeded:

Very rough map of the route we took from late June to early August 2012. From memory I think we put over 12000km on that brand new Citroen!

One of the sub-aims, or "curiosity missions", if you will, was to visit Transylvania, and hopefully, Dracula's castle. Ever since I played that Transylvania computer game as a kid in the 80s, I'd wanted to go there (for a trip down memory lane, or if you were born after 1984 and have no idea what I'm talking about, you can download the game here).

The real Dracula lived in Bran Castle, which is worth a visit, but if you want a proper "what tourists think Transylvania is like" experience, you should stay a night at the Hotel Castel Dracula...if you dare!

Lonely Planet's description is hilariously accurate; this is indeed the place to get your Dracula t-shirt and mug, and the tour of "Dracula's tomb" is certainly kitsch yet somehow still scary, and worth every Romanian lei.

While Dracula was a pretty scary dude, he's got plenty of competition. From churches full of skulls and bones, to gypsy shanty towns, to the legacies of Europe's most wanted dictators, there's plenty of stuff in this part of the world that will scare the pants off you.

With that, here's a collection of photos from the trip that loosely align with the "spooky/scary Eastern Europe" theme of the article's title. Enjoy!