Here we are (Zlatina and Kevin) sitting in the front seat of the bus. I’m on the left … of the picture that is … it’s in the mirror anyway. Zlatina’s daughter Galia took a bus up from Sofia to meet us here, she arrived shortly before we did.
This was the bus from Burgas to Plovdiv (at left), we weren’t able to take the train to Koprivshtitsa because the track is out between Karlovo and Koprivshtitsa.
I have to remark that Plovdiv smelled like Sofia, like Los Angeles to me. I know that we didn’t get to see anything of Plovdiv, other than a nice restaurant and the bus station, so I have still to travel to Plovdiv for a real vacation.
This kind of travel in Bulgaria is easy enough when you travel with your Bulgarian friends 
The buses were clean enough, the ticket agents and drivers friendly enough, and helpful. The other passengers were well-mannered and quiet, no troubles. Other than having to stay in a bus for hours at a time, this was good traveling.
Leaving Plovdiv on another and smaller bus, here is an example of the kind of roads we traveled to get to Koprivshtitsa.
We left the “main” road a couple of times for the bus driver to let off or pick up other passengers in little out-of-the-way villages.
Some of these little villages were real “village”, goats in the streets, pretty much everyone you saw was old. Walls made of adobe wearing down in the weather and time. Picturesque, certainly.
One of the reasons I went on this trip was to take pictures of the mountains in autumn color. And we did see lots of color – with our eyes. The bus windows were a bit too dirty, the hour was a bit late, the sky was gray and cloudy … not the best day for photography. But I have to say the mountains on the way up were quite beautiful, and even if I can’t share pictures with you I can highly recommend the drive from Plovdiv to Koprivshtitsa at this time of year.
We spent the first night in a nice hotel,
“Dzhogolanova kashta” if I’m remembering correctly. Nice breakfast, they didn’t charge us for it. Good coffee, good pancakes, good food generally.
About mid-day we walked east out of town onto a mountain road. What can I say about what I saw there, that you can’t see in the photo gallery linked at the top of this post? It was beautiful.
Koprivshtitsa is a town, a village full of history. Continue reading »
Photo Gallery
And it shut down my web server too (whine), and even worse – I could not make espresso!
Hey, it’s almost easier to say it when seeing it spelled in Cyrillic.
