We got up at 7:00am and hit the road right away Friday morning. Two reasons for this... first, it's a good way to warm up Max's interior without using propane, and second, we wanted to get out of the big city of Alanya before the traffic got heavy.
And we did... there was hardly any traffic on the road.
And a much better one than the last few, because the sun was shining and we were able to get out do stuff!
We needed to find a laundry. There were a few listings in the big touristy city of Alanya (pop 300,000), so we packed up early and drove the half hour or so into the city.
We are fine, thanks. We've received a few messages of concern because we are geographically fairly close to the action, so to speak. And yes, we are following the headlines and are aware of what's going on in the world.
But we don't worry so much about "what if", so we continue with our plans, for now.
Another wet overcast day on Tuesday, but at least we managed to find a two hour window where we got out for decent walk.
Today is supposed to be worse, with pretty much non stop rain, and a total accumulation of more than two inches. We were going to move on just for the sake of moving on, but I think we've decided to just wait it out. We have electricity and a good strong cellular internet connection.
Yesterday evening, we published our February expense report. If you missed it, you can read it here.
A few weeks ago, we told you about an overnight scenic train ride that we wanted to do between Ankara and Kars, or the reverse. Tickets are really hard to get, but we put in our request hoping that we might get some around the end of February when we were in Antalya area and we could have flown from Antalya to either Ankara or Kars to meet the train.
Had we not done those medical checkups and bought me a new pair of hiking boots, February would have been an all time record low month. Of course keeping in mind that February only has 28 days, but still!
We spent a total of $1,884 CAD ($1,487 USD, €1,322), but our actual living expenses were less than half of that!
We got on the road around 8:00am so that we could take advantage of the early Sunday morning lack of traffic in order to get ourselves out of the city. We took the coastal route, which is a little slower going but we had done the faster route in the car when we were here in December 2020 and it was not a scenic drive through a lot of industrial areas.
The coastal route in this area between Antalya and Alanya is loaded with big resort hotels... one after the other.
We drove over to Vera and Bob's apartment and found a parking spot really close by. They offered to let us use their washing machine and so we did some laundry and had nice hot showers!
Then when we the laundry was hung up to dry, we walked over to the same restaurant where we had lunch with the other Senior Nomads group last Tuesday.
We took a rare day off from writing the blog. We didn't have anything to write about! Thursday was a wet, rainy day, and we had done a lot of walking the previous three days so we simply took a day off from that as well!
We're still waiting here in Antalya for the hiking boots that I ordered to show up. We didn't really want to drive anywhere, and there were a lot of puddles on the nearby bike trail. We ended up contacting Bob and Vera, the Australian couple who we had met the other day.