any tips for romania

Hi,
Traveled by rental car in Romania 2 years ago and loved it... Such a wonderful surprise. Flew into Bucharest, got a car and map and just drove..the villages were wonderful, sharing the road with horses and carts. Visited Brasov and the Transylvania area, just beautiful, then went to Singashora (sp.) dropped car and took a train to Budapest and flew out of there. I am a photographer so you can see my images of that trip by going to terrykathrynlawrence.com if you would like. I could also answer specific questions if you have them. Loved the food, people, scenery and it was so reasonable, compared to Europe. It is one of my favorite places to travel.

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I agree with Terry kathryn.
We usually fly into our destination city, take our rental car, buy a map and start driving. I seldom reserve accommodations in advance. We like to stay in zimmers.

Sometimes I plan the towns in advance and other times we take them as they come. That makes travel more of an adventure for us.

We have traveled in Hungary twice, Slovakia and in Czech R. so I will assume Romania to be equally appealing.

Be sure you buy a good highway map with a lot of detail after you arrive–not here.

Ask if there are any toll roads. Avoid them and stay on smaller roads. Ask about drop charges if you leave your car in another city.

Good advice about the map... after about ten gas stations that did not sell maps we simply used our little country map from some tour book, but the roads were well enough marked and we just went from city to city. We never encountered any toll roads, as a matter of fact there were no expressways only two lane roads, but in good condition. Again, it was easy enough to find our way around. We did not have reservations, just decided where to stay once we arrived. I could probably find my journal of the cities, I tend to forget some of them. There was no drop charge for the car as we left it in Romania. We could not take it out, and then took a train to Budapest. Very few American travelers... they thought we were Germans! And the people were intrigued with why we came to Romania... we tried to converse as best we could. In Transylvania we stayed at a wonderful little place called Penisure (sp) Ana, that was right by Dracula's Market! It was a beautiful trip and I would go again in a minute. There are however lots of 'barking, wild dogs' and this does go on all night. I really thought it could not be as bad as I heard, but if the noise bothers you get earplugs. They wander in packs and from what I understand, it is a sign of their freedom from communist rule! So, they will remain.
Brasov was a wonderful college town and quite different from the surrounding villages with the locals selling vegetables on the street and hauling their goods in horse-drawn carts.

We traveled to Bucharest, Brasov, and Bran Castle in 2006. We did this on our own using public transportation and it was fairly easy. Just watch out for the cab drivers in Bucharest.

Do a search for previous threads here that talk about Romania.

Thanks everybody for your input every little bit of info helps.

It's a good idea to rent a car if you want to see the country side. However some roads are bad, some are not paved and in Transylvania you will have to drive on very sinuous roads.
You might want to rent an automatic car if you are very good with the shift stick cars.Persiones are very cheap and clean. Hotels all over Romanai tend to ve expensive and some of them are not up to US or Western Europe standard.
Try to buy a map in the US, a good one.