Birthday Adventures

In May and early June we had a lot of staff birthdays and we wanted to celebrate them all differently, which led to some fun adventures!  The most outstanding one was a trip up to the mountains for Kirsteen's birthday.

We took the trip up to also find the road in to where we will be camping with the boys from the orphanages this summer.  We have been there before but had never driven ourselves so we had to find the right way through many winding mountain roads.

The first thing that happened was that we had to stop on the road for a dump truck that was being filled up due to a washout, and it was a pretty steep incline.  When the road was clear we tried to go but one of the vans wouldn't start.  Everything pointed to the starter not working, so the only thing I could think of was to roll start it down the hill.  Of course I had to go backwards with no power steering or power brakes on a curvy one lane road with no guard rails!  Thankfully after a few tries it started up and we sent that one into the nearest town.  We continued on with the other van and now I can say that I've done some mud running in Romania!

This lake reminded us of when we went to the highlands of Scotland, very beautiful.  We made it to the camp and talked to the guys that we'll be staying with, and then we headed back.  There was one fork in the road that we weren't quite sure of which way to go so we went the way that the sign was pointing.  After a while things started to look unfamiliar and soon we knew that we had gone the wrong way.  Since we were going down the mountain we didn't want to turn around and go back, but we should have because the road we were on seemed to go on forever.  We finally made it to Sinaia after we drove on that detour for an extra hour and a half!  We were hoping the whole way that this road would lead us to somewhere where we could find our way back, and thankfully it did.

After that long drive we went and relaxed at the Irish House restaurant and had a nice time with Kirsteen for her birthday dinner.

We ended the time there with a wonderful dessert - papanasi, which are doughnuts with sour cream and fruit sauce on top, yum.

We went downtown Bucharest to celebrate Steven and Haley's birthdays.  After walking around quite a bit trying to find a good place to eat, we arrived at a great Turkish place and had a wonderful dinner there.

We tried a little bit of everything, we had a couple of kebabs...

...and some Turkish dumplings and this stuffed eggplant with chicken.  Turkish food is so good! 

After dinner we searched around for a great dessert and found one at a place called Chocolat - this chocolate cake with raspberry sorbet, chocolate ganash  and raspberries.  Wow, it was so good, a great way to end a great evening.

Downtown Bucharest is really pretty at night, and I am still enjoying using my new camera to get cool shots like this one.  This is the supreme court.  We also celebrated Josh's birthday with a pizza and game night.  We played a lot of catchphrase and had a great time.