This post was originally published on this site

My husband and I shifted our locally built Dacia into gear at dusk, setting out on a two-hour drive north from Bucharest, Romania’s capital, to Transylvania, a mountainous region in the center of the country. A mist turned into ravaging rain just as the road turned twisty and treacherous near the Carpathian Mountain pass.

Romanian friends told us this area of medieval villages and fortified churches had little to do with the fiction of “Dracula,” yet the night was turning into a vampirish cliché. In his 1897 novel, the Irish…