Bulgaria Part 1: Belogradchik Fortress

September 10, 2016: 

When given a week in Europe to do whatever you wanted, not very many Americans would say they wanted to spend their time in Bulgaria. Many wouldn’t even know that Bulgaria is in Europe, and some may even ask what country it’s in. Bulgaria has a particular significance to our little family because Carli spent 1.5 years living there as a missionary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She lived there from summer 2013 to the end of 2014, and is now fluent in Bulgarian. She lived for a few months at a time in Sliven, Blagroevgrad, Stara Zagora, Plovdiv, and Haskovo. While Carli was on her mission in Bulgaria, I was Living in and around Novosibirsk, Russia as a missionary. Thanks to my two years there, I speak Russian. Russian and Bulgarian are closely related languages, and though not very many Russians speak Bulgarian, there are many Bulgarians that speak Russian. Since Carli didn’t do a lot of tourism while living here, we wanted to go and see some of Bulgaria’s gems, as well as visit some of the people that she taught. I did most of the research and navigating, and Carli did most of the translating.

Our Rental Car! We even returned it in one piece. 

We returned from Athens on Saturday morning and the plan was to get the rental car right away and take off to Belogradchik for the day. I hadn’t packed my driver’s license in our day bags that we brought to Athens, so we had to make our way back to the mission home to get it before going back to the airport and taking off. We haven’t activated our phones for international use because AT&T doesn’t have a good international plan. This means we’re restricted to WiFi use so when we are driving, it would be like living in the MapQuest era. We reserved a Chevy Spark (or similar), and when we went to pick it up, they guy who helped us said in a Bulgarian accent (If you don’t know a Bulgarian accent, a Russian one will do). “Oh! I have nice surprise for you”. They had upgraded us to a 2015 Ford Fusion. It had Bluetooth, and more importantly, it had a GPS. I think God just knew that without a GPS, we would be a lost cause and end up in Turkey or something. After they moved 5 cars that were parking ours in, we were off.

Not the front gates...

The Belogradchik fortress is something I discovered while researching Bulgaria and places that we could go… I found it on Instagram and thought it looked cool. I won’t pretend to remember anything about it, or it’s history, and I’ll just show pictures of it and how awesome it is. 

Carli's not scared of heights! 

The Belogradchik fortress is probably the coolest castle/fortress that I’ve ever been to. There were literally 4 other people in the whole place when we went. Entrance fee was something like 2 Bulgarian Lev, or $1.20. a person. Thanks to the lack of traffic there, there was no tour guides, or safety rails, or rules, so we could climb all around on top of the big rock towers right on the edge of the cliffs. Carli had to do a handstand for her sister Lynsie because wherever Lynsie goes, she always does handstands. We enjoyed the early evening exploring the fortress, and then drove back to Sofia for some much needed sleep.

This one is for Sister Lynsie Udall!

I need a tripod.