Hiccups and Serendipities

As many of you know, Katelyn arrived in Antalya last Wednesday, and we have had a blast together. It is so great to be able to show someone the city that I have grown to love - to be able to say "Look, this is the place that I love to stop at for breakfast on Sunday mornings, these are the schools that I work at, these are the people I spend my days with." Plus, I'm just really glad to get to spend almost 3 uninterrupted weeks with Katelyn!

We left Antalya on Monday morning, flying to Izmir, where Katelyn's mom lived for a few years when she was really little. Katelyn wanted to try to find the area where Sandy lived, but we had very little evidence to go on. After depositing our backpacks at the bus station, we hired a taxi for what we thought would be a short (and therefore cheap) ride. Turns out the hospital that we were heading for (according to Sandy's tips) no longer exists. Our taxi driver was thankfully very much enjoying our "buyuk macera" (big adventure) and eagerly took us all over town (twice, actually) asking passersby on the streets where the American Hospital might have been 50 years ago. With my broken Turkish we ended up at the airforce base in town, talked with some soldiers there who called an older officer who vaguely remembered where the base or the hospital might have been at that time. Suffice it to say, we ended up criss-crossing town, and ended up back at the beginning. But, it was a grand adventure, and we laughed the whole time!

Izmir was fun, but we really only had a short afternoon there because we took an evening bus to Marmaris, where we were supposed to catch the Tuesday morning ferry to Rhodes, the first Greek Island on our itinerary. As we were in the taxi driving to the port on Tuesday morning, Katelyn and I both commented on how pretty Marmaris was, and how we wished we had more time to see it. When we got to the port we found out very quickly that the ferry was cancelled for the day, rescheduled for Wednesday morning. The first hiccup in my carefully laid plans turned out to be a serendipity as well! We went back to our pansiyon, dropped off heavy backpacks, and proceeded to spend an incredibly lovely day nothing pretty much nothing in Marmaris! As it is the off-season for traveling, and Marmaris is very much a tourist town, it was fairly quiet. We spend hours sitting on the sea wall in the harbour, soaking up the sun (though it wasn't exactly warm), visiting the small castle, enjoying lunch, and getting lost in the alleys and stairwells of the town. It was an absolutely wonderful day!

This morning we started out again to Rhodes, and were successful in our mission! And actually, we were very glad that we had less time in Rhodes than planned, about 5 hours total to see what we could. And what we did see was weird. Rhodes Old Town is a delightful walled city, but it is completely run by tourism, and so everything was shut down and closed. It felt like a ghost town. But strangely, there were cars rushing up and down all the streets, tons of them, clearly going somewhere. We felt like there was a party somewhere that we weren't invited to - so odd. Actually, it made me think of a Diagnosis Murder episode where the whole town was involved in a smuggling ring, and outsiders were not appreciated.

I am currently sitting on the ferry (which looks and feels more like a cruise ship) on the way to Santorini. I am seriously looking forward to our time there - 4 uninterrupted days on sightseeing, and probably a lot of relaxing. As much fun as it is to walk around and discover new places, I am looking forward to the chance of taking a bit of rest time on this vacation too. No photos yet as I am not on my computer, but I'll put some up as soon as I can!