As somebody who signed up for maybe the most tourist-trap trip ever created (that being Halloween at Vampire Castle in Vampireland, Earth), I was compelled to go all-in with the American cheesiness and choose a vampire novel to read throughout my Romanian vacation. Might as well, right? If you sign up with an American tour group company featuring a very American-themed Hollywood trope, it’s going to be an unbelievably American-centric trip. You know who goes to Dracula’s castle on Halloween? Americans, Australians, Canadians, and people of the UK. It does make me wonder if there’s anything like that in the US; that being a Holliday or location that Americans don’t even care about, but tourists from one specific country come just to see it.
My travels through Romania were not authentically Romanian, but things are very rarely ever authentic when you’re a tourist, no matter how many barefoot bloggers lead you to believe otherwise. I went with a group because I hate driving and Romania is nothing but driving. This was the first time traveling in a big tour group and it will likely be my last, but new experiences are always interesting, even if said experience is a consistently drunk Tennessee woman burping behind you on the bus and one-upping her friend to the extent of it just being funny to listen to (Oh, did you just say you have a friend name Nicole? I have a friend named Nicole too and she’s a well-known painter. What does your friend Nicole do?).
The beauty of a bus is that you can put on noise-cancelling headphones and listen to music via Romania’s wildly and surprisingly strong cell reception (seriously, half the time I’m in Maine my phone doesn’t work, but here in an ocean of trees and mountains my phone blasts five bars as long as we stay on the main road), while trying not to throw up on windy curves so that you can continue to read the gay-vampire romance you brought with you.
Johannes T. Evan’s Heart of Stone was Victorian-themed, cute, and a perfect slow-burn for a five-hour snail-slow traffic trip. There’s no better place to mood-read than a foggy morning in a bus going through a mountain pass, where people used to use it as a chokehold to rob people in the medieval ages (as well as occasionally impale them), and listen to the very areas of legend that inspired the European vampire myth and, by extension, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Only, I didn’t want to read about Dracula, as I’ve read it before and I was far more in the mood for fluff and light-heartedness.
Romania’s a country with a brutal past and an awe-striking landscape; Evan’s book was a balm to all the long tales of subjugation, lumber mafia, communist dictators, and earthquake disasters. With every impaling, forest-siren, and starvation story I learned about, I could breathe in with a scene regarding the inherit sexual tension of neck biting or joint office file organization. I loved Evan’s writing and I look forward to reading more from them in the future, though I do wish they’d hire a better cover artist. Still, they are clearly an amazing self-editor or they hired a very talented one because, for a self-published piece, Evan’s novel was only a few buffs shy of a fully polished novel. I look forward to reading more from Evan in the future. They’re the perfect companion to headache-long car rides.
Highlights of the Trip:
1. Fat gas station dogs
2. Extremely beautiful forests
3. Slamming food
4. Pretty much all of it. I had a lot of fun!
Livejournal + 