Europe and Beyond

 Monday 29th May Our original flight to Germany was around midday and given how early you need to get to the airport (they recommend 4 hours here) and to allow time to return the car, we chose to stay much closer to the Airport than Gallipoli.  That Lufthansa flight was changed to be about 4 1/2 hours later, meaning we would get to Germany very late, so we cancelled it and are now on a Turkish Airlines flight at 3:35pm.  What all of that means is that we probably could have left from Gallipoli for the airport and added a day in Bodrum or somewhere else. No matter, we stopped in a seaside town on our way today and had a short walk along the beach.  The beach had sand, but the sand looked dirty and not terribly inviting - to us anyway.  There was small marina with a bunch of fishing boats so we went and had a look.  In the water near the boats were hundreds of jellyfish just floating around.  Back in the car we stopped at another beach about 5kms further...

Friday 26th May A short drive this morning to visit Troy, site of the Trojan Horse.  We weren't too sure what to expect here but found both an Archealogical Site and a museum.  We went to the Archealogical site first and saw a 1975 replica of the horse itself, however it was being refurbished and was screened off.  We were quite disappointed, though could still see the size and it is enormous, around 25 feet tall (Nearly 8metres)  Walking the area was both disappointing and surprising.  Disappointing because there was little left of Troy besides some walls and foundations.  Unlike the other places we had been there was no major buildings or columns still standing.  Surprising because it turns out there have been many versions of Troy, each built on top of each other.  They are referred to as Troy I, Troy II, Troy III etc up to Troy IX.  Troy I dates back to 3000BC which each subsequent version being built on top of the ruins of the previous o...

Tuesday 23 May We left Fethiye at around 9:00am and headed inland to Pamukkale.  We were stopped once on the way at one of the usual police road blocks and this time as well as looking at my licence he asked for our passports.  No issues though, we were on the way again pretty quickly. We arrived in Pamukkale at 11:55 and check in started at 12:00 midday, so that worked really well.  What wasn't as good was that our room is on the top (5th) floor and there is no lift.  The hotel dude carried one of our suitcases and I took the other.  The room though is quite spacious and has some views of the Travertines, so we are pretty happy. We headed straight out to those Travertines as they were partly the inspiration for this trip, thanks to photos from our friends Jo P and Tracey Hogan from 30 years ago.  The Travertines are created from Limestone that comes up from hot springs.  Though many of the natural pools are now dry it was still pretty spectaular....