The start.

It's only a week to go before we leave for Cluj-Napoca in the heart of Transylvania.  We are going for two weeks, and haven't prepared at all, no packing, only three nights accommodation booked, in fact the only things we really have prepared  are our air tickets and passports.

This is unlike us, normally everything is carefully planned and thought through.  We managed to get in this position through a series of protracted twists of fate.

The day after we booked our flights Carolyn found out she was pregnant, we have suffered too many miss carriages in the past to risk a trip away from home, so we made the decision to cancel them. Except we couldn't under Wizzair's terms and conditions.  So the tickets sat in our inbox.

Very sadly our world changed again and we lost baby Tyler at 15 weeks.  We have a blog about baby loss at http://courageandhope.co.uk/ and a twitter feed https://twitter.com/survivingloss

It wasn't for a few weeks when remembered the tickets.  And something to focus on other than baby loss seemed like a really great idea.

Plan A was to hire a car and take a grand tour of Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the Ukraine. However the car hire company let us down, with only a couple of weeks to go. Out of all the countries on our route, the Ukraine was the one I was most interested in, and I suggested a train journey to Carolyn. She agreed and a bit of googling found a night train to Kiev.

Further googling revealed tours of The Zone of Alienation were possible, this is the area around the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Carolyn was a bit harder to convince on this one, but eventually she agreed. 

Her decision was patrially influenced by Fiona, my aunt. Her son, Andrew died at 23 years old, and it was his ambition to travel to Chernobyl. Fiona asked if we made it could we take something of Andrews with us.  You can see his story on this Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/AndrewsJourney

If you ever travel from Romania to Ukraine or Russia, forget about booking tickets on the internet. We discovered that it COULD be done, with great difficulty, but it is also far more expensive. Also don't expect to be able to book over the phone. After a very, very long phone conversation with a employee of the train company DDB, who operate a train on the the route, they still couldn't tell us how much their own train would cost!

So the decision to wing it was made for us, and the unplanned holiday is soon to begin.