We took another MyDayTrip from Brasov to Chisinau, our 4th route with MyDayTrip. The drive from Brasov to Chisinau was long – approximately six hours, but we didn’t want to miss out on going to Moldova, and we would have wasted a lot of time if we’d had to drive back to Bucharest to fly. …
We stayed at the JW Marriott Bucharest Grand Hotel [on points] which was beautiful and amazing. It was near the Palace of Parliament. To be honest, I was floored by Bucharest’s scale. Everything was bigger and grander than I expected. The scale of the city was off the charts, which had been part of Ceausescu’s …
We had not originally planned to go to Thessaloniki, but consider our visit there serendipity. When we shifted our flight to Athens, we needed to find the best way to get to Skopje, which was our next target city. While we could have flown from Athens to Skopje, there were no direct flights at the time …
We 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 …
Why the Balkans? In all honesty, why not? We want to go everywhere and see everything, and we hadn’t yet been to the Balkans. Also, we had visited the Baltics a few years earlier and loved that region, and we wanted to continue exploring Eastern Europe. Now having been there, our top reasons to explore …
We took an 8-ish hour drive from Skopje, North Macedonia to Sofia, Bulgaria, which included two stops: quaint Osogovo Monastery in the North Macedonian hills, and magnificent Rila Monastery about 2 hours out of Sofia. Our personable MyDayTrips.com driver Ivo dropped us off at our hotel. And so our Sofia adventure began! Sofia was one …