As you will probably know if you have read this, we spent the festive season at our in-laws in Petresti, Satu Mare, at the other end of the country. Having completely forgotten to book flights back when we should have done in October, we ended up driving. The experience was, surprisingly, not all bad.

It helped greatly of course that we could avoid the hellishness of the Valea Prahovei. We don't think that a day of the holidays passed by without the television news channels showing a three-hour traffic jam between Comarnic and Busteni.

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No, instead of the Valea Prahovei route we took the Valea Oltului option, driving via Pitesti and Ramnicu Valcea to Sibiu, where we spent the night in order to 'live test' the newly published Sibiu In Your Pocket, which by a miracle of printing, publishing and distribution was sitting on the reception desk at the Sibiu Ibis not four days after we had uploaded the final version for the printer. (Don't ever let anyone tell you that you can't get things done double quick in this country).

The next morning we completed the journey via Alba Iulia, Turda, the nightmare that is Cluj (there is no by-pass), Zalau, Tasnad and Carei.

All in all Bucharest – Petresti is about a nine hour drive, only slightly more than the usually overly-optimistic Google Maps says it will take. Not bad, but it should be remembered that with motorways between major cities it would be doable in around five and a half hours.

At present there is a motorway only on the first 110km of the journey (the old Bucuresti – Pitesti motorway). There is also an odd bit of recently opened motorway somewhere in the Turda area, about 35km or so, which goes from the middle of nowhere to the middle of nowhere, but a total lack of signposting makes it useless. We did in fact see it: the DN1 passes underneath an impressive looking viaduct at one stage, but finding out how to actually get to it was beyond us.

Anyway, lack of motorways aside, the point (yes, there is one) we want to make is that the state of Romania's national roads is really rather good. At least better than many people appear to think it is.

In fact, the only dodgy bits we hit on the entire journey were when passing through cities, and on the county road between Bobota and Carei, the last leg of the journey. While on the E68 and E81 the road surface is invariably impeccable: nary a pothole to be seen.

Of course, portions of dual carriageway are few and far between, the road passes through way too many villages and the need for motorways remains huge. But the next time somebody says Romania's roads are terrible, ask them exactly what it is they mean.