It was on a Saturday, the 4th of July, in 2009. Finally some nice weather after a series of rainy days. I called my friends, Marius and Claudia, and invited them for a ride up the mountain.

In Brasov, we took the cart roads continuing from Macinului Street (you can check the beautiful panorama of the old city in this previous story), and ended up on the main road to Poiana Brasov.

By July 2009 I started taking my Canon 40D and a tripod on most of my adventures, so I can show you some of the pictures I took. It was right at the beginning of a long photo experiment shooting my pearl white samurai and getting to understand how to make a small white car look beautiful in pictures. You can check below my photos of the samurai in Poiana Brasov, and see how I was shooting various angles in the same scenery.

The muddy shortcut

When we reached the “shortcut” to the forest road taking us to Postavarul we were surprised to find ourselves in a rather muddy situation. It was not as bad as a few days ago when I pushed the samurai into the Harman swamps… But the first part of the uphill was pretty slippery and my skill on such terrain was close to nil.

After the first failed attempts to deal with the mud, my friends needed a smoke, and I stopped to take some pictures and think about the mess we were in. I wasn’t expecting my ultimate-offroad-machine not to be able to pass its first mud. Looking back at the pictures now, I must have forgot to lock the MLRs to the 4×4 drive, because at least from the pictures, it doesn’t look that bad. I can’t remember how we got over the muddy business, but I bet I just made my friends walk. Sometimes loosing weight in an already lightweight car can really make a difference.

The good part about this messy situation is that I got to take some pretty cool pictures with my friends running through the muddy forest road. Again, my triggerhappy photographer style ended up with some nice animated gifs that you can check below.

Ruia and the photoshooting

When we got to the Ruia plateau the sun was already fading and a thick mist was clinging to the place. We stopped again to take a few pictures and I got to play with time and exposure as you can see below. Guess I was pretty inspired to take the tripod with me all those times. You know, the tripod is a photographer’s best friend.

Postavarul Chalet

In the last photo of this collection you can see a Kawasaky enduro bike (the KLR 650?) just in front of the Postavarul Chalet, where we stopped for a while to celebrate our conquest. Indeed, it was easy to celebrate back then, when each ride was sort of an adventure.

Slow ride to Postavarul Chalet (4th of July 2009)
A story by Rares Dragan, published on March 7th 2016