Visnove...

Visnove, the little town to which Csjethe Castle is nearest, barely shows up on any maps. Indeed, I wouldn’t have even known it was there but for Google Earth, and so getting there from Novo Mesto proved to be a bit of trick. However, after some limited communication with the ticket lady, I held in my hand a ticket to Visnove for a train that left just a few minutes after my purchase. I verified that the ticket was accurate with a Catholic nun who was at the station (thank goodness for multi-lingual Catholic clergy!), and then hurried across the tracks to jump on board. The conductor was a paternal looking man with a big mustache who took special care in describing to me which stop to look for in order to reach Visnove, and it’s a good thing he did because Visnove (it turns out) is too small to actually have a station. Instead, the train just sort of stops in the middle of a big forest and pauses for a moment as any passengers who want to jump off must either instinctively know to do so, or have been instructed ahead of time. But before reaching Visnove, I have to comment on the beauty of the scenery around me. As we chugged from the relative flatness of the towns and left what appeared to be civilization, the landscape changed almost immediately to rising hills and thick forests. A brook running beneath a bridge here, a rustic hunting lodge there, a small row of village homes on the left, and the increasing height of the Carpathians as we moved further and further into their embrace. I remember my heart beginning to beat faster as I noticed an increasing number of birch trees, with their white trunks and their outstretched limbs forming arcs over the rails, and realized that this was just like something out of my imagination. I wondered if wolf packs still prowl the thick underbrush, and whether or not you can hear them on cold nights, or, naturally, under full moons, and could then hear the Count’s comment about such creatures to Jonathan Harker whispering in the back of my mind, “Listen to them – the children of the night. What music they make!”