I'm sure that you are wondering why I haven't blogged in so long and what happened to Day 5? First, it is now October 21st and I'm writing this from Antalya along the southwestern coast of Türkiye. This is the first "day off" that we've had since Day 5. My apologies, but it looks like this may be one of the last chances to write while we are still in Türkiye. As for what happened to Day 5, you might recall that Istanbul was hit with a huge rainstorm on Day 4. The weather seemed a little better on Day 5, a little unsettled, but definitely better. But when we asked the hotel concierge which of the other neighborhoods of Istanbul, we should visit, he strongly advised that we not go anywhere. He said flooding was still widespread and that the metro was not working in some parts of the city. Chris and Mark eventually went out for a walk, but I stayed in the hotel in order to get a couple more blogs out.
Day 6 is the first of our moving days. We have breakfast and then check out and go downstairs to meet our driver for the ride to Istanbul airport. We notice that security is a little different in Türkiye than it is in the US. Everyone coming into the terminal and everything that they are bringing with them goes through a scanner. Once through this check, we go to Air Türkiye to show our passports, check our bags, and get our boarding passes. Then we go through a second security screen. They have the magnetometers set to such a high level that even our iWatches set them off.
I mentioned that the Istanbul airport is huge - and sure enough, we find that our gate is as far from the security checkpoint as you can get. Oh well, we were not going to get our steps in for the day any other way.
When boarding time comes, everyone gets into two big lines dividing the front and back of the plane. Here, they do the sensible thing from the point-of-view of minimizing boarding time and board the back of the plane first. I'm not sure how they make sure that the people in the back don't take all the overhead bin space in the front of the plane, but there is still plenty of room by the time that we get to our seats.
The flight to Cappadocia, which is almost in the exact middle of Türkiye, takes about an hour. Instead of the typical pretzels for snacks, we get a nice hot sandwich that is a little like a chicken parmigiana. Good!
The airport in Cappadocia, actually a town called Nevşehir, looks to be brand new, maybe even still under construction. But instead of getting off through a jet bridge, we get off on stairs and walk into something like a Quonset hut. Along one side of the hut is a one-way conveyer belt. The bags come down the belt and if someone doesn't pick them up, they are either picked up by an airport employee at the other end or they just fall on the ground.
We get our bags and go outside to find our driver for the almost one-hour ride to our hotel in the town of Uçhisar. The geography outside the airport looks a lot like the high plains of Utah, Wyoming or western Nebraska.
Uçhisar turns out to be a kind of vertical town. The roadways are all one-way and we seem to come into town at the top and travel down narrow little streets to the hotel. Our van drops us off in a parking lot and a 6-seater golf cart comes up from the hotel to pick us up. I didn't understand this until I saw the hill that we would have to walk up or down. It is really steep! Anytime I went up a flight of stairs, I found myself a little winded. It was only later that we understood that Uçhisar is at about 4,100 feet.
Our hotel is amazing. There are only 11 rooms and instead of numbers, they have names. Ours is Aja. Here are a couple of pictures of the surrounds from our room:
No comments:
Post a Comment