TauniWe decided we wanted to visit Bulgaria and Romania, then stretched the itinerary West hit North Macedonia, and East to Moldova [the least visited country in Europe according to numerous sources, so of course we wanted to go!]. We thought we’d use Bucharest as our entry/exit point as we could book with airline points, but the flights sold out before we booked, so we had to re-think our route. We found tickets into Athens on points, so we booked to Athens and then had to figure out how to get everywhere from there.
We researched trains, versus rental cars versus busses [Rome2Rio.com is a great resource to help plan transportation!], but didn’t find trains going between the cities we wanted to visit. Busses get you from point A to point B, but they don’t usually allow stops along the way, so you miss everything en route. We also heard that when were there in 2021 some of the bus routes were stopped due to Covid. Rental cars give the most flexibility and give you the ability to stop anywhere along the route, but they can be stressful because of navigation, parking, and road rules [we’d gotten speeding tickets in Italy, and we had also gotten burned on a previous trip where we were charged for a dent that we didn’t cause.] Rental cars are also challenging if you are crossing borders and flying out of a different country than you flew into [there can be hefty charges for one-way rentals, especially one-way cross-border rentals].
As we were considering our options, we found MyDayTrip.com which seemed to offer both the flexibility of a car and the convenience of a bus [more convenient actually!]. MyDayTrip is essentially a car service that will pick you up from one location and drop you off at the next, but with an added bonus. It offers stops at popular tourist sites along the route, for small added fees. We booked 4 different routes through MyDayTrips, crossing 3 borders, and stopped at 2 different tourist sites on each route. Our MyDayTrip days turned out to be the highlights of the trip. We totally recommend MyDayTrip.com
Itinerary: Not going to lie – our itinerary was a whirlwind, and it was like a game of Tetris for us to fit as much into the time allotted as possible. Where some people like to hang out and relax on vacation, our travels are always about seeing as much as we can. We get up early each day, walk everywhere we can and see as much as possible. While our itinerary was “normal” for us, we should have made more allowances for Covid-related delays. While we had checked all of the country’s entry rules [which allowed us to travel as long as we were fully vaccinated], things could have changed at any point. Our whole stacked agenda almost fell apart when one of our Covid tests hadn’t come through in time and they wouldn’t let us get on the plane at JFK. Fortunately, we had gone to JFK early, and capitalism was at work and they had testing services [for a hefty fee] in JFK, so crisis was averted, but that scare put us on edge that some other part of our tightly interlocked itinerary might fall through. But – it all worked out as planned, and we were able to follow our full schedule.
Day 1. Flight to Athens, land in the evening. Dinner.
Day 2. Day in Athens – walked through the city to the Acropolis. Flew to Thessaloniki. Dinner in Thessaloniki.
Day 3. Morning in Thessaloniki, lunch with a friend. MyDayTrip from Thessaloniki to Skopje. Stopped en route at Matka canyon and Stobi Architectural dig.
Day 4. Skopje. National holiday. Toured the city, but weren’t able to go to any of the museums because they were closed.
Day 5. MyDayTrip from Skopje to Sofia. Stopped en route to visit two different monasteries. Walked through Sofia in the evening.
Day 6. Sofia. Market. Synagogue. Ruins in the subway. Museum of Soviet art. Flew to Bucharest. Dinner in Bucharest.
Day 7. Bucharest. Ceausescu’s mansion. Romanian village. Old Town.
Day 8. MyDayTrip from Bucharest to Brasov. Stopped at 2 castles along the way. Evening in Brasov.
Day 9. MyDayTrip from Brasov to Chisinau. Evening in Chisinau.
Day 10. Chisinau. Markets in the morning. Tour of Cricova Winery in the afternoon.
Day 11. Flew home to NYC.
