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…

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…