When most people come to visit Turkey, they have three things in mind... Istanbul, Cappadocia, and Pamukkale. It's almost like nothing else matters.
Something like visiting Machu Picchu in Peru, or Niagara Falls in Canada.
And normally, a popular tourist attraction is popular for a reason. There is something about each of the places mentioned above that makes it worth visiting. That is, if you can put up with the hoards of tourists and the inflated prices that go along with it.
Although we totally enjoyed ourselves at the Aphrodisias Ruins site on Friday, we didn't really get much in the way of exercise. We had to make up for that a little bit on Saturday, so we had a bit of an early lunch and then walked over to the big Adalet Park here in the city of Denizli.
Adalet Park is the largest city park here in Denizli, a city that prides itself on its park space. There are sports facilities, a cafe, a large picnic area, a duck pond, walking paths, and lots of places to just sit and watch the world go by.
There's no easy way to get from Denizli to the Aphrodisias ruins. You can either take the longer but faster route on the main highway around the mountains (which is what almost anybody would do), or you can drive the slower but shorter narrow curvy roads through the mountains.
But you know us fairly well by now. We are not "almost anybody", so you should be able to guess which route we chose!
We relaxed for the morning and then went for a walk over to the big 5M Migros store. It was 1.6 kms (1 mile) each way, and we made a bit of a detour into a covered market area just to have a look.
We needed some things for lunch, and the plan was to go out for a drive in the afternoon and then stop in with the car to pick up some more stuff that would have been difficult to carry that far.
We got the car packed up and we were on the road just after 10:00am. It wasn't that long of a drive... but we ended up doing some detours and back roads and we had told our next host that we would probably arrive around 3:00pm... which we didn't because we found a few interesting places to stop along the way.
First stop was for gasoline. The price of fuel has dropped a bit in recent days, plus the Turkish lira continues its downward slide, making our fuel stop a few dollars cheaper than the last time. It was 6.73 lira per liter ($1.04 CAD) compared to the last time we bought it when it worked out to $1.18 CAD per liter.
It was a little bit cooler here yesterday. High of 20C (68F), and sunny for the morning, but clouding over in the afternoon. Far better than the odd mix of early winter that Canada is starting to see! Looking at Cabri, Saskatchewan where the park is that we worked at for four summers, the high today is supposed to also be a mild 20C (68F). By Monday, five days from now it's supposed to go down to -17C (1F). Yikes. Talk about flipping the switch from summer to winter!
We relaxed for the morning, then after lunch we walked over to the kite boarding beach to see if we could get some up close views of the action.
We didn't do very much on Monday. We're trying to take a day off every now and then! But that doesn't mean we don't have things to talk to you about. Besides, it took forever to get yesterday's blog post online for you. Our internet connection is overall not bad, but the upload speed is a little slow. So with all of the pictures we had to show you, it was a time consuming process.
But we did some reading, and got some exercise and went out for our 5 km (3 mile) power walk. And of course there is a never ending supply of onward travel research to do on the internet.
Well, we knew that October was going to be an expensive month. We spent $3,182 CAD ($2,405 USD) for the month.
But, considering that we started the month in Ottawa, Canada and ended the month in Turkey, I suppose that's not bad. And, since our Ottawa to London airfare was actually paid for way back in May, it doesn't actually feel as hard on the bank account.
Here's how it all broke down...
Too many photos! We took over 100 photos yesterday. I've whittled them down, but there is so much interesting stuff to show you that this is going to be a long blog post.
Sunday morning we made our way over to the ancient city of Kaunos, which is located beside the modern town of Dalyan. For whatever reason, not many people visit Kaunos. It's a little difficult to get to, and most tourists who go to Dalyan seem to go for the river boat tours.
Thanks for your responses and comments regarding yesterday's post. It feels good to know that most of you will find our daily blog posts without clicking through facebook. Because we post every single day when we're traveling, all you have to do is to manually check in here (either by booking marking this site, or typing www.travelwithkevinandruth.com into the address bar above, or searching "Kevin and Ruth" on Google)... and you will be brought right here without the need for facebook. If you do that every day at around the same time, you can't miss a post!
Most of you will know by now that parts of Turkey and Greece experienced a fairly bad earthquake on Friday afternoon at around 1:50pm local time.
I wouldn't normally talk about something like this, but other than our 5km (3 mile) power walk we didn't do much due to the weather yesterday. And I think this is important.
We've been using Facebook for more than 10 years. We keep in touch with our kids and friends through their messaging system. We join various discussion groups that we might be interested in. We operate an RV'ing in Mexico group that has over 5,000 members. We operate a Travel with Kevin and Ruth page that directs people to this blog. And lastly, we make money from an Amazon group that has over 24,000 members.
We've only been in the country for two and a half weeks, but we wanted to go over with you some of the interesting things we have learned during that time.
Admittedly, we did not know very much about the country prior to our arrival. And really, we didn't even know we were coming here until three days before we arrived. So we didn't have much time to educate ourselves about our destination.
For quite a few days, the weather forecast had been calling for a 100% chance of rain on Wednesday afternoon in Marmaris, Turkey. They kept on changing the projected start time of the rain, varying it between 3:00pm and 5:00pm. But either way, they were 100% sure it was coming.
And they were right. But it started a bit early at about 2:30pm. Fortunately we had already completed our 10 km (6.2 mile) hike in the hills behind Marmaris, and were just finishing doing a quick grocery shop when it started coming down.
Thanks for all of the suggestions and comments regarding yesterday's blog post. We have decided that we will not go to Cappadocia on this trip. It's too much driving and we would feel too rushed. We are confident that we will return someday with a motorhome when we will be able to explore more of what Turkey has to offer (including the northern area closer to the Black Sea), at a better time of year related to the weather, and at our own pace.
On Tuesday, we took a drive down a coastal road to a viewpoint overlooking the town of Oren. We left at about 10:30am did some exploring and made a couple of stops along the way and didn't make it back to the cottage until almost3:30pm!
