ComfortZone

I’ve been wanting to put these stories in writing for a long time. It was a time that is still pretty vivid in my memory as I think of it every year at this time, yet happened almost 30 years ago! It was a time of great adventure! I wasn’t the least afraid of what might happen to me. I knew God was with me and was going to remain with me no matter what happened! He still is!

This post describes the final two days of my Christmas break trip through Eastern Europe. On this two-week trip, we were detained and questioned twice in Poland (one incident is in Christmas Day in Poland, 1979), broke down once in Poland (actually we got diesel pumped into our van instead of gas, but it took a while to figure that out!), had a super-close call at a border crossing (see Holey Bibles, Part 1 and Part 2), and drove all night through a blizzard (this post!) There are more stories, but I’ll save them for another time. It has become a bigger set of posts than I expected already!

After visiting the famous “Dracula’s Castle” in central Romania (it was closed, so all I saw was the outside walls), we had to exit the country by the next day—New Years Day. We had about 200 miles to go. On the first leg, we picked up a hitch hiker, a young man about our age (18-19), and took him on to the next city. He invited us to stop in at a New Year’s Eve party he was going to. We decided it would be a fun cultural experience, so we did.

We were welcomed in, and it was not too much different than a party of young people in the US (American rock & roll, snacks, same fashions, etc). We tried to communicate as best we could (Romanian has its roots in Latin, so my Spanish helped in some cases!). As I remember, we left at 9pm or so and headed west towards the border. We had quite a ways to go, and had the Carpathian Mountains to go over. Imagine Bend to Portland in a blizzard, no snow plows! (The Cascades are higher than the Carpathians, but this comparison gives a good distance measure!)

We drove into the night, and it began to snow heavily. We chained up and continued driving as the weather worsened. Soon the snow was thick on the road (8-10 inches?). We were the only vehicle traveling on it—we were making the only tracks.

As we crested the mountains, we came upon a man in the road. He was frantically waving us down, and as we approached we saw he was very distressed. We couldn’t communicate with him at all, except it became clear that he wanted us to give him a ride in the opposite way than we were going—he wanted to go east, back to where we had just come from! We motioned to him that we would be happy to take him west with us to Timisoara, but he would not go with us. I remember the awful feeling I had driving away and leaving him standing in the blizzard, and wondering what he must have needed…

By now the snow was deep, and blowing. We made it down the mountain, and began to cross a flat plain. The wind was whipping across the road north to south, and the snow was flying horizontally. The wind actually blew the snow completely off the road here, except where there were many large trees by the side of the road. There was a long stretch of road where these trees (oaks?) were evenly spaced, one every 30-40 yards or so. In the protected areas of these trees were 2 to 3 foot high berms of snow stretching completely across the road! We would speed up as fast as possible, smash through the berm of snow, gather up speed, smash through another, etc. For quite a while this pattern repeated. As we did this, the snow would billow out, whipped up by the howling wind, and stick to the sheltered side of our van.

Because of the strong wind, the van was completely clean and dry on the windward side, but the other side began to collect an icy pack. Soon the van (it was a Fiat camper van) began to lean heavily to the left side. It was hard to steer, and had a lot less power with all the extra weight! Over and over this continued… pick up speed… smash. etc. I remember once or twice stopping and trying to chip off the 4″ thick ice pack on the driver’s side, but it was stuck fast! It was now 1 or 2 in the morning, by the time we started to see light on the horizon, we finally arrived in the city of Timisoara.

We headed to the main hotel downtown, to wash up and have breakfast. We parked and entered the hotel only to see that there had been a huge New Year’s Eve party there, and none of the sinks or toilets were fit for use. Evidently there had been an excessive amount of liquor consumed, because it smelled and looked horrible, even in the lobby. We left, and headed for the border. I don’t remember where we ended up eating or washing up, but we managed to leave the country on time, with no other troubles.

Even the border crossing was a snap. It appeared to me that the guards had apparently been up late, and probably had been drinking also, as they sent us through quickly. My souvenir to remind me of that is the smudged and unreadable stamp they left in my passport.

(The passport photo with the big hair is added just for your enjoyment!)

It was good to finally enter Austria and the free world after our uneventful drive through Yugoslavia (this area is now now Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia). I remember noticing the huge contrast between the drab, dirty, and dim “East”, and the clean, bright, and modern “West”. It was two completely different worlds. I was back in a world where I was free. It felt like I was home again!