Traditional Turkish Bread

We arrived with a plan to stay here two nights and ended up staying four nights. And are we ever glad we hung around. Yesterday, spring arrived in this part of Turkey. In fact, the whole country seems to have jumped into spring this past weekend as sunny skies and increasing temperatures have taken over the area.

In the morning, we went for an 11 km (7 mile) walk around the villages near where we are staying. And in the afternoon, the campground became quite busy with picnickers and our hosts showed us how they make traditional Turkish bread.

Max got a bath

Lots of comments yesterday regarding replacing our computers. The "Mac vs PC" arguments are still alive and well I see! We will stick with the more frugal choice. We have spent less money in ten years on PC laptops for the both of us than what it would have cost for one Mac laptop ten years ago. Hopefully they will last another few months until we get back to Canada in August.

Anyhow... Ford vs Chevy... who really cares, provided they both do the same job. 

Planning our travels around the weather

Sunshine one minute and showers the next. That's been the story the last two days, and it looks like it's continuing today. It kind of makes it hard to do anything, and of course it makes it difficult for the laundry to dry!

It seems like we've been dealing with on and off weather issues since we arrived back in Europe last October 1st. Sure, there have been some nice days mixed in there as well, but we sure do miss the perfect weather that we would get every winter we spent in Mexico.

Kamp Alani near Antakya, Turkiye

Laundry needed done, and holding tanks needed emptying, so we decided to go to a campground for a couple of nights. I found one on iOverlander that was surprisingly not listed on park4night. It also got great reviews on Google Maps, so we headed over there Thursday morning.

The Museum Hotel and St. Pierre Church

I know I said yesterday that we are done with museums for a while, but when we were at the Antakya Archeological Museum we had bought the combined ticket which included access to the Museum Hotel and St. Pierre Church along with the Archeological Museum.

Max is parked right behind the Museum Hotel, so that was the first place we headed Wednesday morning.

I am a little bit in awe of where we are right now...

Yesterday's drive took us from north of the big port city of Iskenderun to the valley city of Antakya.

Antakya is located in Hatay province, which until 1938 was part of Syria, and the area still feels more like Syria than Turkiye. Not that I know what Syria is like, but the area definitely has more of a middle eastern feel to it than what we have experienced elsewhere in Turkiye.

And in fact, we are now only 20 kms (12 miles) from the Syria border. 

Not every day is a good day

And yesterday was certainly not one of the better ones, but in the end we are fine and it's just another adventure.

We packed up from our beautiful free campsite and set off at about 10:30am. I decided on a backroads route so that we would avoid having to return to the big city of Adana. The road wasn't in great condition, but I would rather go slowly that way than have to deal with the traffic through the city.

We had a beautiful first day of Spring!

What a gorgeous day we had yesterday. Blue sky and sunshine! It could have still been a little warmer, with a high of only 10C (50F), but there was no wind at all and with the sun shining it was really quite nice.

So we left Max behind and set off on a 10 km (6.2 mile) hike to try to get to the nearest high point.

Booked the rest of our flights, and found the perfect free camping spot!

It's a really tough call booking flights this far in advance. Especially for summer travel which is expensive to begin with. Then add in constantly changing Covid restrictions that are wildly different in each country, and increasing fuel prices, and it's hard to know what to do. But, I'm overall happy with what me managed to book.

So, we fly back to Canada August 5th from Amsterdam. We arrive in Montreal with an 18 hour layover before our flight to Calgary. 

We are sticking with our original plan

We didn't really do very much yesterday, except we spent a lot of time with Duygu  and Timmy talking about the many things to see and do in this area, as well as talking about their road trip to India and looking at some photos and telling stories. 

Although, Ruth did go with them to the fabric guy to buy the material for the covers for Max's dinette seats. I was feeling the need for an afternoon nap, so I stayed behind and did just that!