Every year, I take an “adventurous” trip abroad with my wife and our two daughters. Often, my father comes along and it makes for a three-generation experience that we value so much as this stage in life. The past few years, we’ve found ourselves in Eastern Europe, including the Baltic Nations of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and Croatia and several western Balkan countries. It’s truly a highlight of my year to explore the world with my loved ones.

This year we decided to fill in some gaps in our experience in Eastern European and selected the neighbouring countries of Romania and Bulgaria. Each country was distinctly different from the other due to different influences in their histories and modern-day trajectories. In Romania, we largely spent our time in the gorgeous Transylvania region with its Saxon-influenced architecture, folklore (you might be familiar with Dracula), and the mountainous countryside that linked our journey from town to town. In Bulgaria, we journeyed cross-country to visit more diverse parts of the country, including the mind-boggling rock formations of Belogradchick, the Medieval city of Veliko Tarnovo, the seaside resort town of Sozopol and the Madara national historical-archeological reserve.

I didn’t take the camera out a lot while we were there while I focused on family time, but below you’ll find some of my images from the trip. Not easily captured were the rather enlightening and at time comical moments of cultural immersion, which as foreigners added so much to our experience. From ordering off of menus written in a Cyrillic alphabet to adapting to some new rules for the road, the trip was an unexpected adventure in so many ways. We especially fell in love with the landscapes of these two countries, which I hoped to convey in these images!