Sundays With Vlad From Wal-mart to Transylvania, One's Man Quest to Live in the World of the Undead

One Tragic Kingdom "This is Romania. They will drill a hole into the tree, put a lit stick of dynamite in there, and say, 'You've got about two minutes to unchain yourselves.' " Every morning when you head out to squat in your little cubicle, sip burnt coffee spiked with foul creamer, and stare at a computer screen until your eyes hurt, know this: Somewhere in a beautiful medieval town in eastern Europe, it's already quitting time for Nate Gendreau. It was quitting time years ago. Right now, while you steal a game of Minesweeper, Nate's probably sitting down with a pair of cute female backpackers, tipping back a golden pilsner, and laughing at you. Nate's lived your life. He gave it up. He never looked back. "By the time I was twenty-six, I'd worked at Circuit City for eight years, and I was completely burned out," he said amiably, with that belt-sander accent people from the Boston area have. Nate's a Lowell, Massachusetts, boy, but he had become a highly paid executive in a corporate office in New York City. "I had the half-million dollar four bedroom out in Westchester with the white picket fence, a mortgage that was trying to bury me, and a sports car I could never get out of second gear because I was always stuck in traffic," he said. He was good with money, and his job paid him very well. But it was becoming a trap. "It was quite a dilemma. Do you work until you're forty-five and take an early retirement when you're old and gray and fighting three or four ulcers?" At twenty-six, he decided to take a decade off and travel. "People at the office were telling me, 'You're stupid. You're crazy. Most people work thirty years to get where you've gotten, and you're going to throw it away?' "But I was getting up at 5:30 and working until nine at night." Nate was spending all his time at the job or driving to and from his expensive home so he could crash for a few hours and do it all over again. "Sunday was my day off, but I'd be on call. I'd have a beeper, a mobile phoneyou could get me anywhere in the world. That's not a life." Nate Gendreau liquidated everything he owned, gave his father power of attorney, and stashed the money into checking and e-trade accounts. And in 2001, he set out with a backpack and an ATM card for London. By August, he'd hitchhiked to central Romania. Unlike the southern region, razed by massive Communist building projects, the country's interior was still beautiful and pristine. Nate eventually found his way to Sighisoara. The site of a trading center that had existed since the Bronze Age, Sighisoara was founded in the twelfth century by Saxon merchant-knights to protect Europe's eastern flank from Turkish invasion. Its nine-hundred-year-old architecture with gilded steeples, tiled roofs, cobblestone streets, and an old clock tower had somehow weathered two world wars and a brutal dictator who made a point of flattening everything in sight. It was dominated by a massive church fortress with extensive catacombsdesigned so the whole town could wall themselves inside it in the event of a raid. Sighisoara was magnificent. It was just the place to escape a tough job and a bad timebecause of the terrorist attacks of September 11, Nate had decided he'd duck out of large American cities for a while. But he needed a legal reason to stay out in the country. He needed a job, or something like it. "The country has no hostels," he said. "So I figured what better way to stay here than haviBibeau, Paul is the author of 'Sundays With Vlad From Wal-mart to Transylvania, One's Man Quest to Live in the World of the Undead', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307352781 and ISBN 0307352781.