Our trip to Transylvania: Peles Castle

We arranged a one-day trip into Transylvania with Balkan Tours, an agency that provides escorted private tours of both Romania and Bulgaria. Our guide, Andrei, picked us up at the hotel Saturday morning, and we drove north out of Bucharest. Andrei provided a wealth of information about Romania, its history and culture, and about the city of Bucharest and the sites of Transylvania that we visited. We learned a lot from him!

Our first stop was in the mountain resort town of Sinaia, where the Peles Castle was built as a royal residence. When it was finished in the 1880s, it was a very modern building with electricity and its own central vacuum cleaning system.


We took a tour inside the castle, which was quite stunning. We had to put slippers over our shoes so that we wouldn't damage the wooden floors and carpets.

You'll have to excuse us if we don't remember the names of the Romanian royal family. One thing, for certain, is that they had a beautiful summer home. While Bucharest was in the midst of a heat wave, it was cool up in the mountains.



When you think of Transylvania, fog and darkness might come to mind, but in July, the Transylvania we saw had blue skies and green mountains.


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