The McCloyTurkey trip July 2014

http://www.nationsonline.org/maps/turkey-map.jpg

In 2013, I asked Sean and Gretchen if they would like to join me in a trip to Turkey.  I had been there in 2012 for two weeks and wanted to go back, see other places and spend more time with our Turkish Family.  They enthusiastically agreed and invited Kathy Earle, Gretchen's mother, to join us.  If they had any qualms about traveling with Forrest (then about three months old), they did not show them.

Some Background

Sean was an American Field Service exchange student in Turkey in 89-90, his senior year in high school. Gretchen's family spent a year in New Zealand as exchange teachers.  The Toker family hosted Sean in their home in Bursa. Atılgan (notice the soft "i" without a dot--I just learned how to do that in this kind of text box!) Toker was Sean's AFS brother who lived with our family in Rhode Island about three years later.

• 1995 Steve and (then) Kati McCloy visited Turkey for a month
• 1998 Steve, Kati and Sean visited Bursa
• 2006 Steve briefly visited Istanbul at the end of a trip to Transylvania/Rumania with a church group.  Then we met İrem and Cem (pronounced Jem), Atılgan's wife and son.  We met his sister Demet Toker Olesen and her husband Jens and sons Sinan (Nicolai) and Yiğip (Marcus).
• 2012 Steve and  Richard spent two weeks exploring parts of Turkey including Bursa and Ankara. We spent time with Veli Toker (paterfamilias) but Hatice (the mom) was in Zurich being a grandmother to Nicolai and Marcus.  We also met baby Kaan.

  

  Aboard the "Ros" in Fetiye

Back row:  Steve, Atılgan, Jens
Middle row: Cem and Marcus, Kathy, Sean
Front row:  Hatice, Kaan, Irem, Forrest, Gretchen, Demet Veli and Nicolai

DAY 1-----travel  Logan Airport in Boston to Dalyan, Turkey

Dalyan is in southwestern Turkey

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/Mu%C4%9Fla_districts.png/375px-Mu%C4%9Fla_districts.png

Not much to say about a ten-hour flight with a four hour layover in Istanbul and another flight to Dalyan.  Except:  Turkish Airways is awesome.

You do what you need to do is to survive.  Sean and I were on a separate flight from Kathy, Gretchen and Forrest who were flying in from Vienna.  They landed about 15 minutes after we did.  While Sean and I were collecting our baggage and looking around for the rest of the crew, my phone magically rings and it is Atılgan who has driven up from where his family were staying in Fetiye to meet us!  And wonderful Cem was with him!   This is so typical of the kindness, the thoughtfulness of this man. 

  The original plan was for us to take a taxi to our hotel in Dalyan and then drive back to the airport to collect our rental car the next day.  It turned out that our hotel was a lot less convenient to the airport than it had seemed during the planning phase--it was in Dalaman about 30 km away--and so we thought maybe at nearly midnight we might be able to pick up the rental.  Europcar was very accommodating including driving with us to get a child seat.  The only thing they could not supply was a GPS.

So we set out for the CARIA PREMIUM HOTEL

We are bone-tired, we have no GPS but we do have verbal directions from the Europcar guy.  We finally pull into Dalaman, it is after 1:00 AM and no one has enough Turkish to ask directions.  But a guy on the street indicated more or less where he thinks it is.  We go there and, yes, it is the Caria.  But the other Caria.  The host climbs into the minibus and directs us to the cousin hotel.

This is what I wrote in my review for TripAdvisor:  Late arrival from airport. We found the "cousin" hotel and the clerk hopped into the car to guide us to our hotel. A great boon to the tired traveler. It was a good value with a clean room, A/C and hot shower. Generous bottle of water and quiet.

Time to sleep.