At thousands of stars

Our story started in 2000 when Mircea was dreaming of going in for riding tourism in Lotru's Mountains. As a consequence, he bought...a mare and a saddle...

We are a family from Brezoi, in  Vâlcea County, who love nature, animals and Romanian traditions. We have always been thinking of a possibility to enhance the value and promote the beauty of the places and charmful cottages built in Călineşti Valley by our ancestors.

It meant extremely hard work and lots of assiduity to transform, step by step, an almost desert place into a tourist destination.

That's the way the story of  village Odăi came into the world.

Odăi is a settlement of some hundreds of years. It consists of small cottages built of natural materials  (wood, clay, stone), a place almost completely deserted by its inhabitants. The state of the old cottages and establishments all around (stables, barns, hay barns) is getting worse every day. That's why we think that it is high time - before it is too late - to give an example of good practical work which might save bits of what had been our ancestors' life in the mountains once upon a time.

Next to the old Odaia, inherited from grandfather Onică, Mircea and Gigi built a new hut which perfectly fits into the landscape as it is built the same way (of wood, clay and stone ) the old ones had been. The isolation is guaranteed by the wool of about two hundred sheep !

We have got eleven horses, kind and mild on whose backs we are strolling in the hills, meadows, clearings and mountains around.

Our tourists are generally greenhorn riders but after two days here, they already acquire mountain riding skills.

Our strolls can last for some hours or for some days - As you like it !! In the summer, we saddle the horses, load the luggage into the reliable Suzuki and ride up the mountains where we are going to stay for two or three days in the scent of pine and adventure.

The base of activities will always remain Odăi, La mii de stele - At thousands of stars.

The place really has its unequalled charm as it is completely isolated from the village in the valley, away from the rest of the noisy, stressful world. Our neighbours are some scattered huts and the woods. In the evening, the sky is changing - into heaven!? All those glowing stars above seem to be falling upon us into the yard.