The tour of Ephesus with Tuğrul (“TOO-rule” – The ğ is silent. It just elongates the preceding vowel.) today was very informative, but I think we enjoyed the next tours even more. Tuğrul tries to bring attention to local artisans who he says generally go unnoticed and unappreciated. At the rug maker’s facility, we watched…
This morning we took a taxi to beautiful Dilek Peninsula National Park, about 50 minutes south of our Kusadasi apartment. It’s a wooded peninsula with four beaches – one dirt, three pebble. The island in the distance (in the Charlie photo) is the Greek island of Samos. I’d like to take the ferry there, but…
We arrived Friday late morning in this booming, beautiful, seaside, resort town. Mel, whose wife Jan listed the apartment on Airbnb, picked us up (for a fee) in their van from our Izmir airport hotel at 10 am and drove us an hour south to Kusadasi. Mel said when he moved here from Istanbul in…
I’m typing this on my phone in our cave suite; we received a free room upgrade a couple days ago. It’s larger, but the 5 am call to prayer is much easier to hear here, and Laurel can’t get back to sleep. The wifi signal is also nearly non-existent from this location. Oh well. On…
When my alarm went off at 4:15 this morning, I tried to keep in mind that what the kids and I were about to do was something we’d been looking forward to for two years. The Kapadokya Balloon company sent a van to our hotel at 4:45 and drove a Columbian couple and us to…
Cappadocia, or Kapadokya, a large region in central Turkey, is home to strange rock formations called fairy chimneys as well as millennia of human history and is where we are staying through Thursday of next week. We’re staying in a cave hotel which we found out are quite common around here. We’re within walking distance…
I published that last post forgetting these items: I bought the kids ice cream from a street (mall) vendor this afternoon and thought what he gave them was some kind of joke. It was the smallest scoops of ice cream I’d ever seen. Then I realized those are appropriate sizes, I’m just accustomed to enormous…
It’s Wednesday night in Istanbul. We’ve only been here a little over a day, but I thought I’d share a few observations before we fly to Kayseri tomorrow morning. Although we flew into the larger Istanbul airport on the European side of the city, we’re flying out of the smaller Istanbul airport on the Asian…
We’ll be flying to Istanbul on Monday, so this will be my last post from Canada. Here are a few tidbits I learned this month: There are no specific words in French for seventy, eighty, or ninety. For example, 95 is quatre-vingt quinze, i.e. 4-20 15. So you have to do some multiplication and addition…
On Monday, August 11, we rented a Dodge Durango – an enormous SUV which was an upgrade because of limited remaining inventory – in Montreal and drove nearly 350 miles to Bar Harbor, Maine. This was our second time to Maine. The first was in August 2006 when Wayne and the kids and I drove…
Travels with Charlie and Laurel 