There is a particular kind of optimism that only a motorcycle traveler truly understands: the belief, every single morning, that today will be the dry day. After the storms of Apuseni and the damp arrival in Cluj, I woke up in Amadea and Filip’s guest room utterly convinced that the rain had finally exhausted itself somewhere in the mountains behind me. I was wrong, but I didn’t know that yet, and ignorance, as it turns out, is an excellent traveling companion.
A Farewell Breakfast with Amadea and Filip
The morning began the way the best mornings on this trip always do: slowly, and surrounded by people who had gone out of their way to make a stranger feel like family. Amadea and her husband Filip had opened their home to me the night before, folded me into their barbecue, and introduced me to a circle of colleagues who, by the end of the evening, felt less like coworkers from a distant office and more like old friends I simply hadn’t met yet. Breakfast was unhurried. Coffee, bread, cheese, the kind of conversation that drifts between work gossip and travel plans without ever really settling anywhere, which is exactly how a good goodbye should feel. There is something quietly moving about being welcomed so completely by people you technically only know through a shared employer, and I packed the panniers that morning with a lump in my throat that had nothing to do with the weather.
Filip – and I want to get his name right, because he earned it – waved me off from the driveway as I threaded the loaded Scrambler out onto the street. The bike, stacked high with the RUGSAK panniers, tank bag and helmet wedged into every available gap, looked like it always does at the start of a travel day: slightly overladen, thoroughly road-worn, and completely ready.
The Illusion of Escaping the Rain
My route out of Cluj started, sensibly, on the motorway. A short stretch of tarmac to eat up the kilometers before the real riding began, before I peeled off onto the country roads that would carry me east toward Szeklerland and my day’s destination: Szeklerburg. I had told myself, somewhere around the Apuseni descent the day before, that I had finally left the rain behind in the mountains. Romania, it turns out, had other plans.
The sky stayed heavy and unconvinced all morning, and by midday it made its intentions clear with a series of scattered showers rolling in off the surrounding hills. I pulled over at the first proper burst, wrestled the rain suit on over my riding gear in the gravel at the roadside, and watched a wall of cloud dump its contents onto a field of hay bales just a few hundred meters ahead of me. It wasn’t the relentless, all-day soaking of earlier days – more a stop-start pattern of dry stretches followed by short, sharp interruptions – but it was enough to keep me honest and enough to remind me that Romania’s weather this trip has had a mind entirely its own.
Learning to Drive Like a Romanian
People had warned me before this trip about driving culture in Romania, the way people warn you about things they’ve clearly experienced firsthand and found both alarming and slightly entertaining. Riding the country roads on Day 7 gave me my first real, sustained lesson in what that actually means in practice. The single biggest thing I noticed is that speed simply doesn’t drop through villages the way it does almost everywhere else I’ve ridden in Europe. Where a Swiss or Austrian driver eases off the throttle on the outskirts of a settlement, cars here tend to hold their pace straight through, weaving between pedestrians, dogs, and the occasional horse-drawn cart with a confidence that took some getting used to.
I found myself riding a touch faster than the posted limits too, not out of recklessness but simply because matching the flow of traffic felt safer than being the slow, hesitant foreigner getting overtaken on blind corners. It never felt dangerous, exactly – more like adapting to an unwritten local rhythm that everyone else already understood instinctively. Riding well in a foreign country sometimes means reading the road culture as carefully as you read the road surface itself, and Romania rewarded that kind of attention.
Villages, Ruins, and the Texture of the Countryside
The landscape between Cluj and Szeklerburg unfolded in long, rolling stretches – fields of hay and grain, low hills fading into grey cloud on the horizon, the occasional cluster of houses with laundry strung between windows. It’s a quieter, more agricultural Romania than the dramatic peaks of Apuseni, but no less absorbing for a rider who’s willing to slow down and actually look. Storm cells drifted visibly across the open plains, distinct grey columns of rain you could watch approaching from kilometers away, giving me just enough warning to decide whether to push on or wait it out.
The road surface itself, somewhat to my surprise after the patchier stretches near the Hungarian border, was consistently good. Smooth asphalt, well-marked lanes, gentle curves that let the Scrambler settle into a comfortable, steady rhythm even in the wetter sections. It made the day’s distance feel shorter than it actually was, which after the marathon stage into Gyula a few days earlier was a welcome change of pace.
Good Progress Despite the Weather
Between the intermittent showers and the adjustment to local traffic patterns, I still made excellent time. By early afternoon I had covered the bulk of the distance toward Szeklerland, the historic region in the heart of Transylvania long associated with the Székely people, whose distinct culture and language you start to notice the moment you cross into their territory – different signage, different rhythms in the small towns, a palpable sense of regional identity that feels older than any modern border.
There’s a specific satisfaction in a riding day that goes almost exactly to plan, and despite the rain gear going on and off more times than I’d like to admit, Day 7 delivered exactly that. No mechanical issues, no wrong turns, no dramatic detours – just steady, focused riding through a part of Romania I knew almost nothing about before this morning.
A Warm Family Welcome in Szeklerburg
Late in the afternoon, the kilometers finally ran out and I rolled into Szeklerburg to meet another colleague, Timea, along with her husband and her father. This is one of the quiet joys of this whole journey that I keep coming back to: how many people along this route turn out to be connected to me through work, and how quickly that professional thread turns into genuine hospitality. Timea’s husband and father were waiting for me, and the welcome was immediate and warm, the kind that makes a tired, slightly damp rider forget the last few hours of scattered rain showers entirely.
It was arranged, with a generosity that still catches me off guard every time it happens on this trip, that I would spend the night at Timea’s father’s home. His apartment turned out to be a beautifully renovated space, thoughtfully finished, comfortable in a way that felt like a genuine gift after six days of tents, hotel rooms of wildly varying quality, and one memorably themed room in Gyula. Being handed a quiet, well-appointed place to rest by someone I’d met only hours earlier is not something I take lightly, and it’s become one of the recurring, humbling threads of this entire roadtrip.
A Traditional Feast in the Heart of Szeklerland
In the evening, the whole group – Timea, her husband, her father, and me – headed out together to a wonderfully traditional, hearty Romanian restaurant tucked into the old part of town. The kind of place decorated floor to ceiling with folk plates, embroidered textiles, and carved wooden furniture, where the walls themselves tell you something about regional pride before the food even arrives. Overhead hung the Székely coat of arms alongside porcelain plates painted with local floral patterns, and dolls dressed in traditional Székely folk costume stood watch from a shelf near an old family portrait – a small, unplanned museum of local identity woven into the dining room itself.
The meal that followed was one of the best of the entire trip so far. Grilled lamb chops, char-dark and tender, piled generously on a rustic wooden board alongside a fragrant, herb-flecked rice and wedges of fresh lemon. It was simple, unpretentious cooking done exceptionally well – the kind of food that needs no elaborate plating because the flavor does all the talking. We lingered over the meal for hours, the conversation moving easily between English, German, and the odd Romanian phrase I was slowly starting to pick up, laughing about work, about travel, about the sheer improbability of a Swiss colleague turning up on a loaded-down Triumph Scrambler in the middle of Szeklerland.
Colleagues Who Become Friends
If there’s a theme quietly running through this entire roadtrip, it’s this one, and Day 7 underlined it as clearly as any day so far: the people who started this journey as colleagues on a distant org chart keep turning, one hospitable evening at a time, into genuine friends. Amadea and Filip in Cluj, and now Timea and her family in Szeklerburg – each stop adds another name, another face, another small debt of gratitude I’ll probably never be able to fully repay except by paying the same kind of welcome forward myself one day.
There’s a particular kind of warmth in sitting at a table full of near-strangers who nonetheless already feel like they’re on your side, cheering for the trip, curious about the road behind you and the road still ahead. It’s easy, riding solo for days at a time, to romanticize the solitude of the open road – and there is real magic in it, don’t get me wrong – but evenings like this one are the necessary counterweight. The best trips, I’m increasingly convinced, aren’t measured only in kilometers or mountain passes, but in the number of tables you get invited to sit down at along the way.
Reflections Before Sleep
By the time I finally climbed into bed in that beautifully renovated apartment, full of grilled lamb and good conversation, the rain outside had settled into a gentle, steady patter against the window – the kind of rain that no longer bothers me, because tomorrow’s forecast is tomorrow’s problem. Six days of intermittent storms have taught me that worrying about the weather the night before changes nothing except the quality of your sleep, and I intended to sleep well.
Szeklerburg had given me exactly what I didn’t know I needed: a shorter, calmer riding day after the drama of the border crossing and Apuseni’s slippery passes, followed by an evening that reminded me why I keep saying yes to detours through colleagues’ hometowns whenever the opportunity arises. Tomorrow the road continues, deeper into Transylvania and further into a part of Romania that keeps surprising me at every turn – but for tonight, dry, fed, and surrounded by new friends, there was nothing left to do but be grateful for the day exactly as it had unfolded.