Greetings!
We're about ready to leave Bulgaria and cross into Romania. The town of Veliko Tarnovo has been just about everthing we needed to get to know Bulgaria. It provided history, architecture, statues, hilltown streets and stairs up and down, restaurants with great food, fighting towers named after knights on their way to Crusades, tourist shops where you could buy almost anything, rose petal products, and a DHL office which sent off a crucial document to California.
I really want to thank my companion travelers for their understanding and tolerance to modify the trip schedule and routine enough to make sure my need to send a document from here to an office in California while we were k=hiking up and down narrow difficult streets on out adventure today. It really isn't easy explaining to clerks in a Bulgarian office if you don't speak Bulgarian, and they don't speak English. It's especially difficult if they won't let you call a friend who speaks both languages and could have helped out.
In the middle of the day, we made it to the Town's fortress, where our group pushed on to our guide's encouragement to climb the many stairs (and then take the tower elevator) to what I was told was a great panorama. Neither Pat nor I chose to do that, and I hiked out to the far side of the fortress to visit a battle tower named after a knight turned emperor who followed a grandfather of mine (Richard I) into the Crusades.
Baldwin I led his troops in the Fourth Crusade into this territory on their way to Jerusalem in 1205, and never made it beyond here. I did get to climb the tower, and see where he was interred. I know that his death added to the main storyline of my 21st grandfather's (
Richard I) campaign to undertake the Third Crusade. But that's another story told brilliantly in the film "
Kingdom of Heaven" with Orlando Bloom and Ian Glen.
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