He made it there. I have no information whether by this time he was already father to my grandfather, or if he was even married. The only other (completely irrelevant) piece of information that I have is that he apparently called himself Vintilescu rather than Vintiloiu. I have no idea why. Maybe it was easier to pronounce.

Anyway.. As the story goes, he came back to Romania. Now, I have no way to confirm that. I don’t know if that was even possible in those days. Also I have no information on what his financial status was.

Last week, my mom came across this picture:

It seems that my great-grandfather made his way into the little town of Alliance, Ohio, where he walked in to the studio of William R. Nesbitt, photographer, to have his picture taken.

Now I found this intriguing. So I followed this new lead to see where it takes me. Luckily, the people of Alliance are pretty proud of their town’s history and have everything archived and available online.

Here is what a book called “Artists in Ohio, 1787-1900: a biographical dictionary” had to say about William Nesbitt:

So the picture was taken sometime in the first years of the 1900s. Digging a little deeper into the archives I came across some pictures of Alliance from that period. In two of them you can see William Nesbitt’s studio, with a large billboard that says: NESBITT – The LEADING PHOTOGRAPHER.

This image was taken during the great snowfall of 1901

A closer look

A different view

Now there is no point to this story. And no ending. I still have no idea of how things went for my forefather, or what he was doing in Alliance, OH, or why/if he ever came back. But looking at these images, and retracing his steps 100+ years later, I can’t help but wonder what it was like to walk down Main Street East, between Freedom Ave. and Seneca Ave.  and walk into Mr. Nesbitt’s studio.

This was taken on one of the few days when I didn’t use my rented motorcycle and hired a tuk-tuk instead. Makes Bucharest traffic look like a walk in the park. Immensely fun by any standards.

I woke up around 4 a.m. The jetlag is a killer. Last night I went to sleep at 19:30. When I opened my eyes it was still pitch dark outside. So I stayed in bed staring at the ceiling for another couple of hours.

At 6:30 I decided it was enough. I woke Tudor up and we had a wonderful breakfast: coffee with milk, fresh mango juice, scrambled eggs, toast, butter and jam and a banana on top of everything.

After that we took a taxi and went a few kilometers out of town to “Mitad del Mundo” – the middle of the world.

To read the full story click here.

Pentru varianta in limba Romana dati click aici.

We arrived in Quito around 9 a.m., after a flight change in Amsterdam and two other stops – one in Bonaire, in the Dutch Antilles and another in Guayaquil (port town in Ecuador). Total travel time – 22 hours.

We gained 7 hours travelling West, and although we felt like at the end of a day, here the day was just beginning.

To read the complete story, please click here.

Pentru varianta in limba Romana, dati click aici.

As a novelty, the diary will not be accessible in its entirety on the main page of the blog. Instead I have divised a special section for travel diaries which you can access by clicking on the “Ecuador Diary” button under the header of the home page.

Also, this year, the diary will be available in both Romanian and English.

EDIT: Some sort of error prevents users with Internet Explorer 6.0 browser to comment or view the page properly.