Travels in Turkey: Planning and Itinerary

Travels in Turkey, Part 10 of 12

In Turkey

While I’ve blogged about bits and pieces of our family trip to Turkey this summer, I realized yesterday that I never created an overview of the whole trip. For my own reference, I’d like to have access to all of my writings in one place, and I hope that the overview might help someone else out in the future as well!

We had known for a while that my mother’s annual conference was to be held in Ankara (did you know that Ankara, not Istanbul, is the capital of Turkey? I didn’t), and I figured a trip to Turkey would be a great adventure for us all! In addition, while watching some of Michael Palin’s travel videos, I fell in love with the idea of going to Cappadocia. My husband and I cashed in a lot of miles to come up with four roundtrip tickets to Istanbul

Then, the planning, ah the planning. My mom found a great cave house in Cappadocia for us to stay in. We started our planning based around that house, her conference in Ankara and our flights. Unfortunately, travel within Turkey was not easy to plan while in the states, and we found a travel agent in Turkey to help us out. After a few emails back and forth, we came up with a very, very complex itinerary that had us running from place to place, taking trains and buses and dolmuses (little buses) to crisscross the country. I was quite nervous about it all coming together.

And it didn’t. After a few weeks of waiting, the agent got back to us that she could not find anything for us. Talk about stress! At that point, we decided to start all over with our plans, dropping the cave house and simplifying our schedule to something that would work easier for our group of seven.

In the end, our plan became, still not simple, but simpler:
(note that G= me, R=DH, CC= the girls,B=my mom,P= my dad,S=my sister)

23 June: RGCC arrive in Istanbul early, P arrive later, night at Best Western in Taksim Square
24 June: B arrive in Istanbul late, RGCCBP take overnight train to Ankara
25 June – 1 July: BPRGCC stay @ apartments in Ankara
1-2 July: BPRGCC take arranged bus tour to Cappadocia
2 July: BPRGCC overnight in Ankara apartment, S: arrive late and stay overnight in Istanbul
3 July: BPSRGCC fly to Izmir, stay in villa in Selcuk
8 July: BPS fly Istanbul, stay at Best Western until the 10th
10 July: RGCC Fly to Istanbul, stay at Best Western until the 12th

Remember, that’s the simplified itinerary….

2 comments