



I was born, I grew up and here I am now to the present day. I did all sorts of things, good or bad and now I have set my mind to do a good one, meaning a trip around the Earth. As I’ve told everyone, I want to leave through Gilau and come back through Sannicoara.
I am an electrical engineer and I own a company dealing with mechanical processing.
As for the travelling, I can say I have always been passionate about it. Given the fact that my parents broke up when I was 4 years old, the first trips I ever made, were those from one parent to another , being led by my personal whims , when things got bad with one of my parents and moving with the other one , and this lasted until adolescence.
In the beginning, my trips took place by train, which of course , I wanted to drive; the only problem being that it was highly unlikely that I could. So, of course I couldn’t wait to have access to the only means of transportation that you could drive on your own at that age, and that was the bicycle. I recieved the first bike in summer but a potato head stole it next winter.
Obviously, the next phase was the car. Since I had none, I looked around and noticed that my dad’s keys were not as well guarded as they should have been . So I began an intensive self-taught driving course with my dad’s car. By the age of 14-15 , I knew exactly how many dikes a Dacia 1300 can fly over . A thing that I was quite proud of , and happy about , but not my dad, who I don’t know why, but he found it difficult to understand . Logicaly , as he became increasingly better at keeping the keys hidden , my biterness grew .
This culminated in the most unfortunate day of my life, the day I got my driver’s license, I was already 18 , and I had no car. I was an fully qualified combatant, but there was no war in that area. And this just added to the fact that those who released my driver’s license at that time, misspelled the date and printed it one year before.
I quickly understood that it will take me forever to be able to afford own Dacia, which valued almost 70. 000 lei, which meant many years of hard work. I reoriented to something much cheaper, an Alfa Romeo, my first off-road car. So I started to drive around Apuseni Mountains with my new acquisition. After that, considering the fact that it would have been impossible to find a spare part for this car, except for maybe a light bulb or a fuse, I bought all the Alfa Romeo that I could find so that I ‘d have the spare parts secured . But fatality made the exact same parts break down at the same time, all the time.
A few years before this , one of my father cousins used to be one of our frequent house guests, who would drive the cars of the company he worked for, to Campulung Muscel for capital repairs . Any person with a little bit of expertise in the type of cars that were taken and brought back from Campulung Muscel , knows that those cars are often ARO or IMS. Whenever the guy brought them back, with the help of a wonderful twist of taith, he always ended up crashing at our place on Saturday evenings . . He would spend the rest of weekend till Monday at Fodora, which is 35 km away from Cluj, and I knew the parting and returning hours very well . And since I knew these cars should be driven after their fixing , the running-in being the first thing on the list, I couldn’t see a single reason why I should stop my self from taking care of this vital and delicate operation. At first , in my back yard , between the trees , where the IMS could hardly fit, but the ARO was less fortunate. This could only lead to the car’s bumper being scratched and the right corner of it being automatically covered with shoe cream by Monday morning. Not a permanent solution, but the colors matched and it was the only one available .
Given the limitations of the area I was living in , a great amount of time until had to pass until I had a real off road car. Let’s say 20 years … Not to bore myself that much during this time, I filled my existence with age-related stuff, which I like to call generic childhood diseases, like school, college, few years abroad, and some marriages. Not that many, but enough to get a hang of ” what’s the deal” with the hole thing… Then I got my first off road car which was a STEYR Pinzgauer. Then followed a very rapid changing succession of Mercedes Geländewagen, the Gs. I want to go t that trip which I mentioned at the beginning of section “about me” with one of them.