Sometimes the Goals Find You

Our hotel has a small fireplace in the restaurant, and I’ve tried to sit close to its warmth every morning. It’s been a cold few days here in Central Türkiye, and there’s no way to gloss over that, except to note that it’s been even colder back home. Usually I try to go someplace warm […]

Way Down Under the Ground

There were seven of us on the tour today, hurtling down the roads of central Anatolia, frost tipped grasses appearing as blurs out the window. We drove past the Kaymakli underground city, and kept driving into the chilly morning. Our guide today, Ali, explained that we were supposed to stop there early in the tour, […]

Of Tour Guides and Storytellers

Our guide, Hakan, deposited the four of us at the entrance to Uçhisar Castle (at least that’s where he said we were – under the low hanging clouds it didn’t quite match the photos) with instructions to return in 40 minutes, and I rushed down the hill and into the site like a child at […]

Of Course I Ate the Fruit

The airport in Istanbul is one of the newer major airports in the world, and it was designed for growth. It was built to support Turkish Airlines, which boasts that it travels to more countries than any other, and it is enormous. So the connection I booked there was longer than I needed, but I […]

Cemeteries are Eternal

Walking the narrow paths between the mausoleums of the Recoleta Cemetery I thought about the thousands of years of necropolises I’ve visited and the graves I’ve witnessed. I’ve seen millennia of tombs, some as excavations removed from the initial location and placed respectfully in museums, their contents dissected carefully for meaning, others as elaborate pyramids, […]

The Tour Was Fine

I love walking through the core neighborhoods of cities, finding my way about, and seeing the sights. You never learn a city quite the same way if you don’t wander on foot. This works great in small old European cities that have millennia of history concentrated in a small area. And it seems to work […]