Scott actually got out of bed at 7 am and went out to take some morning pictures. Becky was amazed, as lately he has had difficulty getting out and moving in the mornings. In the early morning, the sky is filled with hot air balloons. Apparently, it is supposed to be an incredible way to…

12 km. We had a pretty slow start to the day, mostly sleeping in, and figuring out what we want to do with the rest of our time in Goreme. We decided that we would try renting mountain bikes in the afternoon and check out some of the valleys near Goreme. We got some decent…

28 km, 2.5 hours We began the day with a walk up to the Goreme open air museum , one of the best collections of cave churches in Cappadocia. The first set of dwellings you see upon entering are the nuns quarters. This large multi-storey cave structure looks an awful lot like Disney’s Magic Mountain.…

At 8 pm on Tuesday night, we hopped on the overnight bus to Goreme. The bus had a lower cargo bay than the other buses and with the extra Bayram (Festival) traffic the bus was full, so our bags had to be unloaded and our seats removed in order to fit the bikes. Since our…

On Sunday morning we took the bus back to Izmir for a short visit with Gul and Metin, to do some chores, and to pick up our bikes. We had planned to stay until Wednesday night, but Metin checked for us and discovered that all the buses to Goreme in Cappadocia were full starting Wednesday…

We met our Servas host, Omer, after he finished work on Friday. We had planned to meet at the “Peace and Friendship” statue outside of the HSBC building where he works, but a security guard with machine gun was clear that we weren’t to wait there, so we moved to the sidewalk nearby. Fortunately Omer…

Today dawned cold and wet. It was raining and the temperature was around 10-12 degrees. It was not really suitable for tromping around the Topkapi Palace, so we decided to leave that until tomorrow with hopefully better weather, and do some chores today. Since we did not like our motel, we decided to move to…