May 19, 2016: A Day Without Power

I awoke this morning to the suffocation of the CPAP losing power and taking my air away.  I hate waking up that way.  So I was quite awake, quite quickly.

There was actually no rain today.  This was our first sunny day in a long time.  So that the power (and Internet) were off was quite surprising as they have been up for weeks of continuous rain.

We gave it a little while this morning to see if the power would come back on, but it did not.  As I have mentioned previously, without power we lose running water so nothing to drink without going to the well and no flushing toilets or anything.  So we do not like to stay in the house for any length of time without power.

Since there was no power, I took the girls for a walk over to the playground in the village for a while.  We were the only ones there because all of the village kids were in school, of course.  So they played for a while and had a nice time.

Once we were sure that the outage was going to last for a while we got in the Ford Focus and went for a drive to the north.  It was still morning and a great day for a drive so this all worked out really well as far as the timing was concerned.  We have been needing to drive up to Beclean for a while because the “big” train station is there and we want to stop in there in person to discuss getting overnight sleeping accommodations on the train to Iosi.  This is too complex to do online and we want to figure out the logistics of dealing with the train there as we do not even know where the station (gara) is located.  Not something that we want to be trying to figure out when it is time to be taking a trip.

The drive up was really nice.  The countryside is beautiful that direction.  And it has few enough mountain turns that no one needed to take motion sickness medication today, which was a nice change of pace.

We had to drive around town for a bit trying to find the station, it was not obvious at all.  We did discover a neat pedestrian farmer’s market area in the middle of the city, though, which was pretty cool.  Beclean is about an hour north of our house and is a city of just over ten thousand.  So not that large, but it has the feel of a real city with a nice downtown, apartment buildings, municipal works and such.

I left the family parked on the main street and did some walking around on my own to find the station.  Once I knew where it was, it was easy to drive to.  We parked and went inside.

The Beclean station is definitely bare and not nearly as fancy as even more remote stations in western Europe.  There was one woman working at a window and we were able to, after some effort, convey what we needed and eventually ended up with four second class sleeper compartment tickets for the train for tomorrow night.  So we will be returning to Beclean tomorrow and taking the train that leaves around eleven thirty at night and runs overnight to Iosi on the Moldovan border and arrives just before seven in the morning.  The girls are very excited as they cannot remember having taken overnight trains before, even though both of them have done it twice.  They loved doing it on the ferry and can’t wait to do it on a train, too.

We took the girls to the big central park in the city which is really excellent and let them play on the giant playground there for a while.  Everyone was out in the city today.  The streets, sidewalks, cafes and parks were all loaded with people.  The break from the rain and sent everyone outside, I am guessing.

The girls played for a while but Liesl could not get to the swings that she wanted to play on because there was just so many big kids there.

We got a late lunch at a little cafe near the park.  They did not have a lot of food options, so we got things like fries, onion rings, cheese, etc.  But they did have pastries so we got those for dessert and had some coffee.

After we ate we tried the playground again and this time Liesl managed to get some time on the big dish swing that she loves.  She and Luciana also discovered the exercise equipment in the park and used that for easily an hour.  They thought that that was great fun.

After the playground it was getting cooler as the sun got low and mosquitoes were out.  Time to get in the car and drive back to Baita.

It was six when we got home, still no power.  Iokab was across the street feeding the pigs so Liesl and I went over to consult him about the power situation.  He said that the power company had called and said that it was a planned outage for the day and that the power would be back on at seven this evening.  Just one more hour without electric, then I can get back to getting things done, in theory.

The little piglets are getting bigger.  They are six weeks old, now, almost.  They no longer live with their mother and they eat from the trough on their own.  They were so adorable.

Once the power came back on we got online and the girls watched their shows while Dominica worked on packing (she had been frantically working on that while the power was out just in case it did not come back on and we had to leave for Beclean tonight) so that we would be all ready for tomorrow and I got down to catching up on emails, posting, uploading pictures and such.