Bulgaria: On the Road

On our trip to Bulgaria, we flew into Burgas, on the southern Black Sea coast, stayed at the beach for a few days, and then rented a car and drove up through Varna to Veliko Tarnovo, the medieval capital of the Bulgarian Kingdom - a very cool place with lots of history, a big castle, and a bunch of monasteries nearby.
We spent a few days in Veliko Tarnovo, before heading back to Bugas to fly back to Hungary. On our way back we took a different route, going over the Balkan mountains which run through the center of Bulgaria.
I have to say that the roads in Bulgaria were much better than I had expected. A few weeks before we went, I was in Romania, and was on some of the worst roads in my life. Bulgaria's roads were light-years ahead of even the "good roads" in Romania.
Nevertheless, the road trip took a lot longer than we were expecting - almost 2 hrs longer each way.
But the thing that kept us going was that there were plenty of interesting things to see along the way. Here are some highlights:

Nathaniel did a great job in the car!

 

He slept most of the way, and the rest of the time he kept himself busy with some light reading.

 

Bulgaria uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which means that most signs were in only Cyrillic

 

Even the McDonald's sign!

 

This can obviously cause some confusion, especially for Japanese tour groups:

 

We saw lots of interesting stuff along the way, including beautiful old stone bridges

 

Some MiG fighter jets

 

And an old lady beating some goats

 

We saw this Trabant, which had a Texas Tech sticker on it, which goes to prove that the Trabant is not only the car of the common worker, but of the Texas Tech University grad too!

 

Nessebar police drive the same car that we do - Peugeot 306 Break!

 

Quite frankly, I'm not surprised, as this is the greatest car ever made (sarcasm). I like to tell people that in the word Peugeot, the letter P stands for power, the letter S stands for speed, and the letter R stands for reliability...if you get what I'm saying.

Speaking of police, along the main roads there were these cardboard cutouts of police cars - obviously to make people slow down. They worked actually, except usually you could tell the difference, because the cardboard ones were covered in graffiti.

 

But my absolute favorite thing on the road in Bulgaria were these signs everywhere, saying "You are now entering the danger zone!"

 

Wait...so, in other words, they are telling people that they are on "the highway to the danger zone?" Its almost as if I've heard that somewhere before...