Three days from now, we will be in Turkey (enshalla). Flying from here costs about $575 for each of the three “adults” (yes, Calvin counts as an adult now), the two boys are $475 and Camille’s “ticket” costs $50. She’s a lap baby, but we have to pay the airport taxes for her to fly. I’m writing all this down here because I know from experience that sometime soon I’m going to wonder how much it cost us to travel to Turkey and if I don’t write it down, I’ll forget. And if write it down somewhere else, I’ll never see it again.
Once we finish our week in Istanbul we’ll be flying to the capital city of Ankara to visit friends for a few days. We were going to take an overnight train until we found that the domestic Turkish airlines are really cheap. It’s less than $40/ticket for us to fly, which seems rather crazy in a country where gas costs $11/gallon. I’ll just have to make sure I have my special yellow pills with me since a $40 ticket probably means a tiny, rickety, puddle-jumper of a plane. The reason we were able to get such inexpensive tickets is because Josh booked them using a Turkish website. Yes, in Turkish. When he looked at flights via the US websites they were much more expensive, but he google translated his way to success.
After a few days in Ankara we will rent a car (we figure it will be $100/day, 5 days total) and drive a few hours to Cappadocia. I haven’t figured out gas costs yet — I just know it will be A LOT. If we were complaining about $4/gallon gas in Monterey, how much is it going to hurt when it costs 3 times that much? I can’t even imagine. One of the good things about living overseas is because we’re paying in rials, durham, turkish lira, or the currency of whatever country we happen to be in at the moment, it all feels like play money so it’s less painful handing over a handful of brightly colored “Monopoly” money.
This is the part of the trip I’m most excited about: Cappadocia. It’s in an area of the country that was formed by a volcano so there are tons of caves, ancient cave cities to explore, and our hotel is in a cave (it has windows, so no worries about feeling claustrophobic). We’ll be staying in a family suite that is made up of 4 caves joined together.
From there we drive back to Ankara (expensive) and fly south to the beach city of Antalya (cheap). We were originally going to drive to the coast, but found the same $40 fare so it will cost much less to fly. And, I would assume, be much less painful than a many hour ride in a small European car on country roads.
After a few days at the beach we fly back to Istanbul ($50/ticket) and change planes to fly home. One of the reasons our tickets to and from Turkey are less expensive is because we leave at the crack of dawn and head home in the evening with a middle of the night layover. I wouldn’t normally be ok with that kind of itinerary, but after being evacuated where we spent many hours in many airports, it has to be easier than that.
There have been a few mishaps along the way: a hotel reservation that was accidentally booked for the correct dates, but the wrong month. Thankfully our mistake was caught by the hotel when we emailed them with a question about our arrival and they were able to change our reservation to the correct dates. That could have been disastrous. And last night when Josh was checking on airline baggage restrictions he discovered that the charge for one leg of our trip hadn’t cleared with our bank. It initially showed up as “pending” but then dropped off without actually being paid. He was able to rebook all of us and get a confirmation this time — it just took an hour and wading through lots of Turkish again. Hopefully everything else will come together without a problem.