Goreme Part 2: Nature versus Chris and Ashlyn

Good morning from Goreme!  Still living in a cave, and still wearing coats.  We woke-up nice and early today (5:30 AM) to take our balloon ride through Cappadocia, but after waiting for a couple of hours for the weather conditions to change, the flight was called off for the day.  We’re going to try to go again first thing tomorrow morning, but need to catch our bus to the next town at 9:30AM, so hopefully all goes well!  They pumped us full of coffee before sending us home, so I figured I may as well update the blog.

Yesterday we went to the Open Air Museum in town where they have a little ancient city that was carved out of the rocks.  It was pretty cool.  Here are a couple of pictures:

A pottery tree right outside the museum.

Us sitting at the table carved out of the cave.  The scene behind us was ‘the last supper’.

The landscape

Yesterday afternoon was pretty nasty weather.  It started to rain quite hard while we were sitting in our little cave.  It was hard enough for the power to go out in all of Goreme, and caves are pretty dark when the lights are off, so we sat around with our headlamps on.  Here is how cool we look with our headlamps on in a cave.  Hot stuff if you ask me.

Last night we went to “Turkish Night” which is a dinner and show all about Turkish Culture.  It was a pretty fun show to go and see.  Their basic strategy is as follows: Collect money from hundreds of tourists.  Drive them to a resturant outside of town.  Lead them down a long tunnel underground to a… wait for it…carved out cave!  Start brining out as much booze as possible and get everyone completely hammered.  Begin show.  That was the basic idea…and we loved it!!  Bad night to forget our camera.  It started with the whirling dervish dancers (not the real ones, but we got the idea), Turkish wedding ceremony (complete with a donkey that was somehow brought down this long tunnel), Turkish dancers, belly dancers, and knife throwing.  I think some of the artistic direction was inspired by the evening entertainment shows that they have at Mexican all inclusive resorts because it did involved a lot of black lights, which was a nice touch.  The other nice thing that they have adopted from the resorts is taking your picture and selling it to you.  Except here there is a special twist, they put your picture on a decorative plate and sell it to you.  Sweet!  So did we spend 10 Turkish Lira on a plate?  You bet we did.

This is the one we bought.  Ashlyn grabbed the wine jug to hold up in the picture (the wine came in huge jugs instead of wimpy bottles) and the Turkish guy was not at all impressed that we wanted to ruin the picture like that so made us retake two pictures his way (they looked like passport photos).  You guys know how much we like to ruin photos, so we thought this one was perfect!

Goreme, Turkey

We’re writing this from inside a cave in Turkey.  Yup, caves have the internet.

After a couple of bumpy flights from London to Istanbul and then to Nevsehir, we arrived at the tiny airport in Nevsehir.  They get one flight a day, and ours was it.  When you land on the runway, they just turn the plane around on the runway and taxi back down the same runway to get to the shed that they call the terminal.  It was definitey a bit different than where our journey started today at London Heathrow.

We’re staying in the town of Goreme which is about 60 kms from the airport where we landed.  Thankfully they have a couple of different options to get to the town that we’re staying in…a free shuttle, or the taxi for 50 Lira (about $35 CAD).  Obviously we would take the free shuttle after collecting our bags.  After watching every single passenger on our plane collect their bags and make their way to the shuttle, we heard the guy yell out ‘No more bags!’.  What?!?  No more bags???

After a moment of panic we ran outside of the shed…err…terminal and saw that our bags were on a tractor being driven somewhere else.  More panic, and then we were told that we need to clear customs because Nevsehir was our first point of entry in Turkey.  Fine.  So we walked into the other room in the shed (which was dark and full of turkish customs agents) and we found our bags and had to open them up in front of agent.  No problem, he went throught he bags and cleared us to go.  So we turned around and made our way out of the shed just in time to watch our free shuttle drive away.  Sweet.  So now we are two white people with Canadian flags on our backpacks at the airport where one flight a day comes in and 3 cabbies are just waiting to take our money.  Okay, 50 Lira isn’t so bad for the drive into town.  Sure, that would be fine if the price for the cab was still 50 Lira.  Remember economics classes?  We were now in great demand (the next bus was tomorrow), limited supply (now 2 cabs), and zero competition for the cabbies.  So our cabs were now 110 Lira.  Eek.  To put it in perspective, our room is about 40 a night.  So after some intense negotiation and a lot of hand signals, we settled on 60 Lira for the ride into town.  We’re glad we made it, it’s better than sleeping in the shed until tomorrow afternoon!

Once we got here we loved it.  A truely unique place that is vibrant and has a wide mix of travelers.  We’re looking forward to getting out and exploring the town more over the next few days, but here are a couple quick pictures from today:

One of the caves in Goreme

This is actually our room.

Checking into our room.  This door is actual size.

Us at dinner.  Not a great picture, but enjoying our first Turkish meal.

Cave Blogging

Acorss the Pond

We made it over to London alright.  No major riots in Paris when we were there, and the general strike had ended, so our plane actually had enough fuel to get us to London.  Lucky us!  There were a bunch of people staying in our hostel who had their flights cancelled, so we were getting a bit nervous about making it here on our original flight.

We were really lucky to be staying with friends Melissa and Venessa while in London.  They were awesome hosts, taking us out to meet their friends, inviting us to a party on a boat in the river, letting us totally disrupt the Cheryl Cole interview on the Tele (you’d probably have to be in the UK to get that last one).  Thanks a lot Melissa and Venessa, we really appreciate it!

We hit a patch of rough weather here in London, but still got out to see the sights.  (A bunch of the pictures below were all taken in a 2 hours span without rain!)  We did the hop-on hop-off bus tour of the city.  For anyone counting at home, that’s bus tour #2.  The tour covered all the important sightseeing stops: Buckingham Palace, Parliament Buildings, Big Ben, The London Eye, Tower Bridge, etc.  We also checked out Notting Hill where Ashlyn was secrectly hoping she’d bump into Hugh Grant.  No luck.

We did do some shopping (for warmer clothes) and decided to hit up Oxford Street.  Big mistake.  The best way I can describe how busy the street was, is to have you imagine if the boxing day chaos at Future Shop was multiplied by the line-ups at Disneyland.  That will give you some kind of idea of what the street was like.  It was enough to make you beg for Chinook Centre shopping on a Saturday in December.

Finally, last night we were able to catch a performance of the musical ‘Wicked’ and it was pretty good.  Ashlyn says ‘I LOVED IT!’.

Here are some pictures:

Ashlyn in Notting Hill

Buckingham Palace.

The London Eye

Some Clock 🙂

Ashlyn before seeing the show.

Next update will be from Turkey!

Santa Monica and Palm Desert

Right now we’re on a flight from LAX to Paris and flying somewhere over Manitoba.  I’m pumped that in a few hours I’ll officially be the furthest east I’ve ever been in my life.  (We posted this from Paris, sorry if it’s out of order!!).  We’ve been away from the internet for the last week or so relaxing in Palm Desert where we were staying at Ashlyn’s Mom and Dads house.  (Thanks Alf and Fiona!).

After we left Santa Barbara we drove to Santa Monica and stopped at the beach there for the day.  We decided to rent a couple of bikes and cruise around the pier there and pedal down to Venice Beach.  Definitely do that if you are in the area.  It’s a cool spot (read: super sketchy and full of the craziest people you’ve seen.  ever.  Then mix in some movie filming, 1000 tattoo shops, and an amusement park).  So we rented these chopper bikes and started making our way down the beach.  It was a pretty sweet ride until my bike tire went flat at the furthest point from the bike shop and we had to walk our bikes back to Santa Monica.  Less sweet.  It was still a pretty cool afternoon and we ended up getting the bikes for free because of the flat.  Nice!  Other than the piers, Santa Monica was basically the same as all the other stops along the coast.  Same shops, basically the same resturaunts, same crazy people.  So, we decided to drive over to Palm Desert that night.  Here are a few pictures from Santa Monica:

We had a great time in the desert laying by the pool and doing some running around.  We don’t have a ton of stuff to update you on other than we made good use of the travel insurance after Ashlyn came down with a sore throat and we got to experience the American health care system first hand.  Luckily she was able to get in to see a doctor quickly and got some meds and is feeling better already.  Just in time for the next leg of the trip.  We were kind of lazy in Palm Desert and forgot to take pictures for the most part.  But here are a couple that we did take:

Paris

Bonjour!

So it’s been a few days since we have been able to update the blog. We are staying at a hostel in Paris and the only place we are able to get WiFi is the common area. It’s also the area that has Dance tunes being pumped out of the speaker system so loudly it’s a bit hard to think. Starting to wonder if we’re too old for thish hostel thing!

We have now been in Paris for 1 1/2 days, and so far have had an amazing time. Much colder than the Desert unfortunately. Our first purchase here was not the Crepe or croissant I had envisioned, instead we bought an umbrella!  The day we arrived we spent the day touring around the neighbourhood  our hostel is in; Montmantre. It’s a bit seedy around here, but there lots of people on the roads and great little pockets of streets to walk down. We climbed the steps up to Sacre Coeur at night and walked by all the sex shops leading to  Moulin Rouge! Ah romantic Paris!

Here we are at the Sacre Coeur at night.

Yesterday we had great plans of taking a city tour by bike; we were up and at it by 4:30am ready to go! At about 7:00 we fell back asleep and not realizing it, we slept until 10:30 missing our tour! Instead we spent the day at Versailles.  Not a bad back up plan!

Here is Chris standing by the gates getting ready to enter and be brought back 100’s of years in time!

It was as I remembered, room after room of inlaid marble, carved stone, gold, and amazing art… with one addition; there was a Japanese modern art exhibit going on at the same time. It was the most bizarre thing.

Welcome to the hall of mirrors!

It truly was a sight to see. We would be hearing about the golden throne on the audio tour and instead looking at some bright pink ceramic happy faced flower! Nothing like a little Japanamation to bring you back in time!

Before dinner we were able to get in one more sight!

Last night we had an extra special night. Chris’s Aunt Eleanor happens to be in Paris right now and treated us to a fantastic French Cooking class! It was with Princess Marie Blanche de Broglie, the last of the Julia Child generation of early women chefs. She was amazing! We both had visions of cooking with this “princess” complete with satin, diamonds and pearls. Different kind of princess. She comes from a line of French Aristocracy. Eleanor was her au pair 37 years ago when Julia Child asked her to be her partner – and Marie Blanche said “no”! Here we are in the kitchen! Such a great experience! Thank you Eleanor

Off on another adventure! So much more to see!

Love to everyone!

Cali, Cali, Cali!

So it’s been a few day’s since we have written, so we thought it’s about time we update you all on our progress down the coast.

The rest of our stay in San Francisco was fantastic! We spent Saturday walking around the city, sitting by the harbour watching the air show, and eating great food! I went on my first San Fran trolley ride!

Here is Chris just about to board!

The hills are STEEP! hold on!

For dinner we used our Yelp app (that’s on our i-pods for the parents out there)  and found a great restaurant right by our hotel. We had a fantastic meal! The restaurant uses i-pads as their wine menu so you can read about each wine, mark your favorites etc! It was so cool! The place had to have at least 50 i-pads! The whole night was a really great experience.

On sunday we started driving south once more. Our first stop was Pebble Beach and 17 mile road. Chris’s heaven.

Here he is dreaming he was that man on the 18th green.

After Lunch at Pebble Beach, we drove into the town of Pleasantville, uh I mean, Carmel. What a cute little tourist money trap. I personally could have spent all day there, going in and out of the expensive shops and galleries, but as the money we saved has to last a while, I decided a walk down to the beach and back was about all we could afford.

Here’s a pic of the Beach at Carmel-by-the-Sea complete with Pebble Beach G.C. in the background!

During the remainder of the drive that day, the scenery once again was beautiful. WE passed through about 100 pumpkin patches (loved it!), fields of Strawberries, veggies and flowers, and stopped at a road side stand that had the most amazing produce I have ever seen! Artichokes 3x the size of what we get in Canada, gorgeous heirloom tomatoes, fresh lettuce, strawberries (the best I’ve tasted)!  It was better than being in a museum! I loved it about as much a Chris loved Pebble Beach!

Last night we stayed in a cute little fishing village, Morrow Bay. It was perfectly quaint and we stayed right by the water!

Today we got up and walked around the embarcadero in search of breakfast and then set south once again. Our first stop was Pismo Beach! So Amazing! I think Chris and I both would love to live there. It seems so laid back, and the beach is awesome!  We walked along the Pier and watched the surfers and then took a walk along the beautiful beach!

Here we are at the beach with the pier in the background.

At around lunch today we pulled into Santa Barbra. This place is a shoppers paradise! The main street runs right through the centre of the city and is a walking, shopping street, that leads you directly to the pier. All the buildings are perfect; white stucco with red terracotta roof shingles. It sure looks beautiful.  Not sure how the recession didn’t hit this place, but main street seems to be holding up appearances!

Were going to spend the night here in Santa Barbra. The fog has rolled in, so we’re hoping to get clear skies in the morning so we can really appreciate the views along the coast. I’m totally loving California! The temperature hit 26 today! It’s warming up!

Love to everyone at home!

Ashlyn and Chris

A few of My favorite things…

Ok, so, Chris missed a few of my favorite parts of this past leg, that I wanted to add.

First the WINE! It’s everywhere! We went to our first winery at 11:00 and basically people never stop asking you if you would like to taste their wine. Below is a picture of us at a tasting. As I’m a bit of a lightweight, I managed to get drunk by the end of the first winery.  Yeah, yeah, there is a bucket there so you don’t actually have to drink everything that is poured for you, but I have never been one to waste! Lucky for me, my much more responsible husband, was able to stay sober enough to drive us on to the next Tasting!!!

Second, not Chris’s favorite part, but I love them… The Pumpkin Patches! Complete with little piglets, and market! so cute! I wish we grew pumpkins in Canada like the do in Cali!

Ok! that’s it. Off to find something delicious for breakfast at the market by our hotel, and then watch the parade of ships in the harbour!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! So much to be thankful for!

Cali

California is so rad!

Yesterday we woke up in Santa Rosa and headed toward wine country…it didn’t take long, since we were basically already there.  Took a tour of a Biodynamic winery, which basically means that the winery is 100% self-sustained…grapes, fertilizer (animal crap) from cattle on the property, water, bugs (instead of pesticides), etc.  I had no idea the process was as so complex,.  I guess that’s why they charge so much for a bottle of their wine, but it was a good intro into wine making!!  Definitely recommend hitting up Sonoma and Napa Valley…super friendly towns and a really laid-back vibe.  Here are a couple of pictures:

Today we drove into San Fransicisco and it couldn’t be better timing.   It’s the NLDS (baseball playoffs) in town right now, which means it’s frickin’ crazy everywhere you go.  Orange everywhere you can see.   (Although, to be honest, I think playoff season in Calgary takes the cake).  It’s also Fleet Week in the city, which means it’s basically military propaganda week.  There are fighter jets racing around the bay (and about 100 feet over our heads when we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge), naval ships in the piers, and recruiting drives down the streets.  They tried to recruit me, but I failed the push-up requirement, so I guess I’m off the hook.

We took a tour through most of the day, then walked the streets before heading to the ballpark.  We tried to get some tickets, but the prices were CRAZY.  Running around $175 for a bleacher seat at the very top of the park.  A bit steep for not being able to actually see the game.  We decided to catch the game at the pub in the park, which turned out pretty sweet.  We met some great people in the park who were from southern California, and they took a ton of time writing lists of all the hidden places we should stop at on the trip down south.  Whoever claimed that Canadians were the friendliest people in the world was dead wrong.  Our new friends were absolutely amazing, and definitely went out of their way to make us feel welcome in California.  Here are some pictures from the day:

(As close as I got to seeing the action)

Oregon and Northern California

We’ve had a couple of good days on the road.  We drove through Oregon and Northern California the past couple of days.  The highway was absolutely amazing!  And so good in parts that Ashlyn just couldn’t get enough of it!  Okay, that’s not quite true.  It was pretty intense in parts.  These highways are actually pretty crazy in California…you drive through one portion of the highway that is 100% wide open, strait and divided highways and the speed limit is 45 MPH.  Too slow.  Then you drive through the craziest highway imaginable that is hanging off cliffs, makes your stomach jump into your throat and generally enduces vomiting, and the speed limit is 60 MPH, and really you can’t drive it safely going any faster than 15 MPH.  I guess we are in wine country now, so maybe everyone was a wee-bit hammered when setting the speeds?

Here are a few pics from the past couple of days.

(Along the coast in Oregon)

(Ashlyn on the sand dunes along the Oregon Coast Highway)

(Me at Bandon Dunes Golf Club…definitely need to play this before I die but I didn’t think Ashlyn wanted to wait in the parking lot for 4.5 hours)

(Sunset in Crescent City, California)

(This wasn’t even remotely close to the biggest tree we saw, but it gives you an idea of what the Redwood Forest is like)

(Ashlyn inside a tree that was carved out to look as lame as possible)

(The GPS driving through one of the roads.  Every tiny squigle was a SERIOUS turn in the road, most of which changed 50 feet of elevation during each turn.  Don’t even get me started on what the giant switchback was like…)

(I enjoyed the drive…it was a blast!  This is Ashlyn enjoying it less than I did…which is an understatement since she had her “Sea Bands” on for the whole highway)

no more sweaty palms

It’s been 3 days and 2 nights since we set off from Calgary, and it hasn’t been without adventure, good surprises and a whole lot of anxiety! That being said, we write this blog entry from the seahorse motel right on the ocean in Lincoln City, Oregon, where we can hear  the waves crash on the beach, and really reflect on how grateful we are to be partaking in such an amazing experience!!

We spent Saturday night relaxing at the Beatty’s Cabin just outside of Radium.  We thought it would be good to shave a couple of hours off the drive to Vancouver, and we were ready to get out-of-town, so it worked out well.  Thanks Mom and Dad!

This is us crossing the BC border…

Sunday we drove out to Agassiz, BC (between Hope and Chilliwack) and met up with Chris’s Aunt Maureen and Uncle Earl.  They gave us a great tour of their beautiful log cabin and a short hike around their awesome piece of land, complete with Salmon running up the creek and waterfalls on the property!  It was a really nice visit and we look forward to returning one day! After dinner with Maureen and Earl we continued our drive to Surrey. there we found a hotel as close as possible to the Indian Consulate so we could be sure to be the first ones in line the following morning for their 8:00am opening. Who would have known that when we pulled up at 7:30 today there would already be a line 20 people long!

Although I was turned away at first and told to come back at 3:30 for passport pickup, I was able to convince the security guard we were given permission by some man named Alok to pick them up early…it worked! By 9:00am we had our passports in hand and had already made it through US customs.

us with the ellusive passports complete with Indian visas…

The rest of the day was mostly spent on the road, passing unbelievably beautiful scenery. :Lush forests, autumn colours, the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma, and the ending up in Portland. We had originally planned to stay in Portland, but unfortunately when we arrived, so did the rain. After driving around downtown, and by the river, we decided Portland in the rain was not on our list of things to do, so continued on to the Coast. We’ll have to return one day.

The scenery we saw after leaving Portland was probably some of our favorite so far on the trip. vineyards, orchards, tree farms, pumpkin patches! I loved it all! And finally… the ocean.

Here is our first night outside Canada…

Looking forward to whatever tomorrow brings!

Ashlyn and Chris