Day #2: Travel

After our Chicago hiatus, Krista and I were staring several straight hours of travel in the face, beginning with a ten hour, forty-five minute leg from Chicago to Istanbul.  Generally I'm a good sleeper on flights and I had some sleeping pills with me to boot, so I figured I'd be good to go.  Unfortunately, that wasn't the case.  Despite being terribly drowsy while taxing the runway, we initially hit some stomach dropping turbulence (I'm not going to lie – there might have been some screaming; though, not by me) that sort of jolted me out of my sleepiness.  I settled down pretty quickly, but it messed with my mojo and I slept fitfully at best for about 3 hours.  When I decided to give the cramped slumber a break, I felt like we had to be at least 8 hours into our flight by now: imagine my dismay.  In any case, I survived (barely) and we successfully landed (something I'm genuinely thankful for).  By this time we had met a few people on the tour and despite the fatigue, enjoyed chatting with our new companions. 

 

My first glimpse of Turkey, I'm sorry to say, was less than impressive.  It was approximately 5:00pm local time and pretty much all I could see was the airport and a few brown hills amongst the flat landscape.  It was very….eastern Washington.  In fact, it felt a lot like Yakima.  But I decided to not rush to judgment – heck it's not like SeaTac boasts Seattle's best landscapes either.

 

Our final destination for the day was Izmir, Turkey's third largest city (by population), where we will be staying for the majority of our stay.  So in our brief 90 minute layover we purchased a visa (it's a stamp like a postage stamp, not a rubber stamp – neat, eh?), cleared customs, purchased those pesky Turkish Lira (and got a $1.65:1 rate, yahoo!!), sped walked halfway across the airport to make our connecting flight, and zipped through security (again!) just in time for the final boarding call.  It was tight, but again, Providence was on our side and we didn't hit a single snag.  Our final flight was only an hour long and I managed a solid nap and awoke to learn our in-flight "snack" was really a mini sandwich, tubuli and chocolate-banana mousse (yum!).

 

From there we deplaned, met up with the rest of our group and checked into the hotel. Uh, can you say "five stars"?  Yeah, it's okay :)  We didn't mind the rainfall shower or access to the spa or full-on fitness rooms (!) either.

 

Tomorrow the touring starts for real – Pergamum, here we come!

PS - I know I usually try to post lots of pictures, but as it turns out (long story short), I do not have access to the blogger webpage at all, so I'm posting these via email.  That means I have no idea how to incorporate pictures, so those will have to wait until I'm home.  But I'll try really extra hard to be entertaining with words instead!