Figure 8 On A Bike

We left Dr. Aslan's nice hotel and flew to Erzurum Türkiye. We were unsure about the place we had booked here as it had zero reviews and two different addresses on Booking.com. We messaged to ask what to tell the taxi driver and she called and talked to the driver to get us where we needed to go. This place was BIG. It had an extra bedroom and a living room. We moved our stuff in and quickly had to get to the grocery store as this place was lacking in some basics like toilet paper - which I can forgive in a culture that doesn't use it...but there also wasn't any hand soap...We were looking at staying at this place for about 3 weeks so it wasn't a huge deal to pick up some stuff as we probably would have run out during the stay anyway. The place needed a handyman though and there were a lot of small things that were NOT great for a long stay. Oh well, live and learn. It was above a grocery store and that was awesome! After so many weeks of having limited access ...

After almost 7 weeks (and minus one week in Istanbul), Susan and I finally bid farewell to the southwest corner of Türkiye and the Mediterranean Sea. We looked forward to starting a new stage of our trip after making a trove of good memories (fun climbing and international travel time with friends) and a few less-good memories (Susan in the hospital); but it was almost time to put our new, giant, heavy bags to use and find some Winter! One stop first, though - Cappadocia. Erciyes Dağı towers on the horizon of Cappadocia

It was time for us to say goodbye to Peak GuestHouse. We ended up being there for a month! Which was maybe a little too long to stay in a guesthouse. We said goodbye to Aysel and took one last transfer with Ocan to drop off Hong-Yen at the airport. After dropping Hong-Yen off, Ocan pulls into a roundabout to leave the airport area and immediately gets hit by a motorcyclist. This occured across the street from the police station so first responders got to the man quick. The motorcyclist left in an ambulance and we were directed to the police station. Ben and I stayed out of the way while Ocan went in and out of the police station with various papers from the van. Finally, he was released and he drops us off at the bus station. Our vague feelings of unsafety while driving in Türkiye were justified. We bought our bus tickets for Çıralı , a sea side beach town with climbing access. The bus ride was a beautiful ride down the coast. The bus dropped us off on the side of the highwa...

Hello dear Figure 8 Readers! My name is Hong-Yen, and I’ll be this week’s guest blogger. Saturday, Nov 25 Daily journal entry - No sleeping in. Breakfast and second coffee. Shuttle to the airport. What should have been a short flight turned into a long day of delays due to weather. We finally get to the guesthouse at 9PM after a long and somewhat perilous drive in the storm.   Our last second coffee at the airport