We’re checked into Orty Hotel next to the Izmir airport. Tomorrow we’ll meet Kelly in Athens and we’ll travel with her through Greece for the next two weeks, spending about half our time in Crete.

Here in Turkey, we spent 5 days in Istanbul, flew to Cappadocia where we spent another 5 days, then took two weeks to drive across the country and along the coast.

I turned in the rental car today after driving a total of 1,400 miles in Turkey. Here’s a map of our travels:

Cappadocia was a pretty arid place as you can see from this aerial photo, marking our stops there:

The Mediterranean and Aegean coasts, on the other hand, were mountainous:

Turkey surpassed our expectations. Maybe we’ll come back some day and see the other half – the eastern half – of this country of 80 million people. It’s a very diverse place.