If you think we have a lot of paperwork in the US, you have not been to Romania. First a stop to get permission to photograph records. There is a fee and we have to both hand over our passports.
Next stop the archives. More forms and the passports again to get access to the building and obtain researcher cards. More forms to request the books we want - and there are more of them than we can get access to in a single day. The limit is 5 per person so we can get 15. We get all the books for Sapinta and 10 more for Sighet. We are disappointed that the more recent records for Vonihove and Bustyna do not appear to be available here. No one knows where they might be. We fill out more forms - one for each book saying we have used it and a list of the pages that we have photographed.
Fortunately, we meet a man who speaks Hungarian and English who is able to tell us what the pages we are looking at mean. Always a good thing to study the words for Father, Mother, Location, etc. before you start. Lesson relearned.
At 3:30 we have gone through all our books and Dan has made photos of the pages with names that might connect. What next?
We stop for a quick bite at Dan's hostel and decide to make the run to Sighet and maybe Sapinta. Dan has been to Sapinta, but not via this route so he is interested to try it. And we want to see if we can go to the Ukraine this way so we will stop at the border and ask.
The road to Sighet goes up and over the mountains. It is narrow, two lanes and not a lot of guard rails. As we climb, we get into the low clouds and visibility is bad. Good thing Dan is driving, but he is trying to avoid the pot holes, of which there are a lot. Good thing neither of us gets car sick. Going down the other side, the road is better and there is no fog. Still the 50 km trip takes us about an hour.
The other side we are really in Maramures. Horse-drawn carts, cows in the streets, and all the women in black skirts and kerchiefs. While I would love to take pictures, I feel it's a bit intrusive and again, we are trying to get to Sighet. We do see some more stork nests on top of the light poles - with storks. Here's one we saw on the way back.
We do manage to find the border and Dan and Michael chat with the guards. They seem to think we could cross here if we paid the guards on the Ukraine side. Having done the over the moutain trip once, we're not sure we want to do it again. So we press on to Sapinta to see the Merry Cemetry and see if we can find the Jewish cemetery.
We stopped at the Merry Cemetery and I have several pictures.
We make a brief stop at the Jewish cemetery, which has been partially mowed, but is locked. I take a few pictures of the stones near the fence. A man at the archves told us earlier that these stone do not have any surnames, so finding a family is going to be difficult even after they get them photographed.
Here's a picture of one of the numerous wooden gates we saw. Some are quite elaborate with more carving on the posts.
The trip back over the mountain is a bit hair raising as it is now getting dark and the fog is now thicker. We are crawling along at 30 km in many places. Dan has the GPS map magnified to the point that he can see which way the road turns next. There's one hairpin turn after another. We are really glad he's doing the driving.
We get back to Baia Mare at 10 PM and get a pizza at Dan's hostel.
Long day, but very interesting and I'll try to get pictures up later today. Based on what we found at Sighet, we've decided to use the more official border crossing, so we're headed back to Satu Mare to get to Vonihove. Cyrillic should be fun.
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