Most of us will probably have dressed up for Halloween at some stage in our lives, but for some of us there’s that nagging doubt that we could have tried harder.

That’s not the case for 47-year-old Nick Cunningham; a man so captivated by classic horror movies that for this year’s Halloween season he went to historical Transylvania. Dressed as Dracula. Riding a motorbike with a coffin as a sidecar.

Modern-day Romania was the setting for Cunningham’s journey across the spooky setting immortalised by Bram Stoker’s famous blood-sucking vampire. Riding across the stunning countryside with his friend and partner-in-fancy-dress Nick Jackson, who at six feet, four inches tall, made a convincing Frankenstein’s Monster, Cunningham was living the dream.

This was a dream he just happened to submit to motorbike insurance company Bennetts, under its Bennetts Biking Dreams scheme. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s something of an online genie in a lamp for motorcycling-related wishes. Cunningham had had a look at some of the thousands of ‘dreams’ already entered and thought they were a bit… dull.

“Surely you’d put something that was more fun and that captured people’s imaginations a bit more,” said Cunningham. “I’ve always wanted to go to Romania with all the traditional cultural techniques.” He’s also been a long-time fan of the Dracula mythology, especially of Christopher Lee’s definitive performances as the Prince of Darkness in the 1970s. Dracula was ultimately the only choice for his outfit.

Astonishingly, Bennetts loved the idea so much that they got in touch with the local Ural motorcycle dealer in Bucharest and arranged for two of the dealerships’ own bikes to be used for the trip, with one even being customised to use the brilliant coffin sidecar.

This is no forgery, mind you. The casket you see in the pictures is a real coffin, and dealer principal Cristian Ciornei was only too happy to ma ke the modification – because he could just sell the coffin on afterwards.

The two Nicks flew into Vienna and then on to Sibiu in Romania, where they picked the modified bikes up at the local Ramada hotel. Cunningham is a long-time biker with a two-wheeled history stretching back to high jinks at school, but riding with a sidecar was something really quite different.

“It was the first time either of us had ridden with sidecars,” he said, and if you don’t have someone in them they can lift up [off the ground].” Guess where their luggage went…

As part of Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster’s trip around the former’s old stomping ground, they rode the Transfagarasan Highway, cited by Top Gear as the best road in the world.

Also, along the way they visited Bran Castle, the breathtaking hillside residence Stoker filled with the undead. Located in one of the most beautiful parts of modern-day Romania it’s a sight not to be missed, and Cunningham factored it into his Biking Dream pitch right from the start.

What neither Cunningham nor Jackson thought about were the unusual controls on the Urals that almost saw one of them roll away over a cliff edge from where it had been parked. That might have been an awkward phone call to have to make, but finding a local motorist willing to give two deadly monsters of legend a lift back to a city might have been even tougher.

Or maybe not. Cunningham was full of praise for the country and its people. “The best thing about the place is a combination of stunning scenery, empty roads and the openness and friendliness of the local people,” he said, “whether it was local Romanians or a gypsy shack where their eight children would come out and play around with the bikes.”

Not missing out on the opportunity for mischief, Cunningham would hide in the coffin in full Dracula dress and burst out when kids came to investigate the oddball machine. Good work, that man.

It’s a remarkable thing to have done, and what a collection of stories Cunningham can tell to his own two kids when they’re a little older than their present one and two years.

He took the Bennetts Biking Dreams bull by the horns and was rewarded with a trip of a lifetime – so what’s stopping the rest of us?

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