I've not driven to Targu Neamt from Bucharest, but I've driven most of the route between Sinaia to Suceava (driven in little bits per day)

It's a stunningly beautiful area, but it would be a long, long drive straight from Bucharest. I drove Sighisoara past Targu Neamt to the Guru Humorului area in one day, but it took from first thing in the morning until late in the evening. And driving after dark is a bad idea. You're dealing with mountain roads, narrow gorges and the ever present existence of livestock, horse carts and pedestrians in the roads at all times. So your driving speed is always fairly low.

What else is worth seeing in the area? These would be worth googling:

- The painted monasteries of Bucovina (really unique, set in peaceful places)
- Bicaz Gorge
- Piatra-Neamt
- Pretty much any small town in Transylvania, especially those with with walled Saxon churches
- the Szekelyfold villages

The drive from Bucharest to Tirgu Neamt absolutely isn't my idea of "stunningly beautiful"

Typically takes us about 6 hours by day, though it can be a lot faster overnight. Never really had the time to worry about things to see en route, and the road itself's almost entirely dull (which makes it a lot prettier than the hideous crap the Romanians have built along it over the past 20 years).

Except in the early days after the collapse of communism (and only then in the evenings during the terrifying weeks after the grape harvest when old geezers used to let their horses and carts take them home unsupervised and ran straight into the Mercs doing 100 mph), scarcely ever seen anything other than the international TIR lorries and ordinary cars that dash along the E85. We've only written one car off to drunk cart drivers though - and our driver got out of hospital after only a few months.

The E85 takes you straight from Otopeni (Bucharest's main airport) to Roman, about 40 miles before Tirgu (then turn onto the DN15B). One of the key roads linking Bucharest (and therfore Turkey and Bulgaria) with Western Europe, the E85's a busier, dirtier, version of the unmotorwayised bits of our A1. At a pinch, you can just about get the 11-ish Tarom flight from London, collect the car at Otopeni and get to Tirgu before midnight, though I personally wouldn't drive it in the dark.

I'll defer to Clifton on what's to see if you travel round the area: apart from the Orthodox painted monasteries and the mainly Catholic Saxon fortified churches in Transylvania, there's a fair amount of little-recognised (and often harrowing) Jewish history in the Suceava area, though modern Romania mostly tries to pretend there isn't (you've generally got to ferret it out from Western sources). Iasi, the original capital of once-independent Moldavia, has some OK-ish Victorian-era architecture including a palace that looks uncannily like St Pancras station.

PS: hadn't taken in the "Manchester" reference.

It's often easier and cheaper to fly with people like KLM, Lufthansa, Malev or Austrian to their main hub, then connect to Romania. Sometimes, Frankfurt Munich or Budapest have connecting flights to Romanian provincial airports as well as to Bucharest. Though, in practice, we've always ended up flying to Bucharest then driving on from there you might prefer the shorter drives from Iasi or Suceava.

Great, thanks to both of you for the advice. There's a Lufthansa connection which arrives mid afternoon so we wouldn't be able to do all the drive in the day time - is there somewhere around the mid point of the drive you would suggest stopping off at for an overnight stay?

Instead of taking connecting flights it might be faster to make your way by land from Manchester to Luton then fly from there directly to Bacau with the budget airline BlueAir ( http://www.blueairweb.com/First-Page/ ). From Bacau to Targu Neamt it's a ~1 1/2 hours drive .

Apart from the places mentioned earlier you could also visit the other monasteries in that region, the ones located in the mountains west of Targu Neamt (Agapia, Bistrita, Neamt, Pangarati etc.) - they're less known than the painted ones in Bucovina (north of Targu Neamt), but most of them are very interesting.