The past few days every single minute of my internet time (and there have been a lot of them) have been spent trying to plan our trip to Turkey. We leave 3 weeks from today and are trying to book hotels, plane tickets, and a rental car for various legs of our trip. All was going smoothly (well, smoothish) until we tried to book hotel rooms in Istanbul.
It turns out that most of the hotels downtown are in historic buildings and historic buildings have very small rooms with a maximum occupancy of 3 people. Since Josh’s parents are meeting us in Istanbul we need 3 rooms to house us and our brood of children. And who knew Turkey was so expensive? $200/night for something that a traveler on TripAdvisor described as “grotty.” Hmm. Since we’ll be there for a week, we need to choose wisely.
Surprise! It turns out that Turkey is the hot spot for vacation travel this summer because it’s one of the few countries in the area that isn’t experiencing much political unrest. (Although now that we’ve scheduled a trip there who knows what will happen? See Tunisia uprising/Egypt revolution) So even though we found a couple of nice looking, well reviewed, reasonably priced hotels in the right area, when we went to book rooms, they couldn’t accommodate us (See 3 room problem).
There are hundreds of places to stay in Istanbul, but most of these historic buildings only turn into small, boutique hotels with 10 to 15 rooms. I saw a great place that was the right price, but it only had 5 rooms so I didn’t even bother to email them (see 3 room problem/hot travel destination problem) since even the big hotels were advertising “only two rooms left!”
Of course if we were willing to pay we could have stayed in any number of places (see traveling on a budget problem) or we could have booked rooms in less expensive areas that were further away (see getting around the city with a large group problem), but Josh and I scoured maps and TripAdvisor (love that website — it has never steered me wrong) and found a place with larger rooms, so we can put 2 adults and 2 kids in each room, in the exact location we wanted, for the right price (see Mission Accomplished).