The rain is Spain has moved to Turkey...

Arrival yesterday was an adventure, but it was a dry adventure (that will have more meaning later). The flight was fabulous, we were just about the first off the plane but we didn’t realize how long lines in IST airport actually are. We walked to the sign for “Passport,” past what we thought was a line for transit passengers before we realized that the “Passport” line started about 100 yards (yes, a football field) back. The good news is that we were just in front of another American couple so we chatted about our respective travels for the 45 minutes it took us to get to the front of the line.

Next adventure was finding our driver. OMG, how to describe the chaos outside the customs area! Conservatively, there were 300 signs all with somebody’s name, some very professional some hand-lettered, and all being waved frantically by the holder of said sign. Some had 10 signs, one on top of the other! We did finally find our guy and he took us to the hotel along with most of the population of Istanbul. I do wonder, however, how long car horns last in Istanbul! It was an Experience and if we didn’t already acknowledge that we are never, EVER driving ourselves in Istanbul, that taught us that basic fact of life. Our driver was very good. That means he did not get into an accident. Not that he—and half the population of Istanbul—didn’t try extremely hard to have an accident.

We got to the Wyndham Hotel unscathed but for our shortened fingernails. Except that we were going to stay at the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza. Even the driver was confused. It appears that Wyndham took over the Crowne Plaza just last weekend. But nobody from Uniworld bothered to tell us that we were to be staying at the same hotel, just a different name! (But Uniworld hasn’t bothered to tell us much of anything since we paid our cruise fare in full. But I digress.)

Randy mentioned it was our 52^nd anniversary at check-in and they immediately (I mean IMMEDIATELY—within 10 minutes of checking in) sent us a heart-shaped delicious frozen delicacy, personalized with Happy 52^nd Anniversary. We took a picture. The picture has vanished into the ether somewhere. The problem with digital: you KNOW you took the picture but it isn’t there. Oh well, we have to let it go.

We have been to Istanbul before, albeit for just a day so our tour has been personalized just for us and the places we’ve NOT visited. Today we had our first personal tour—just the two of us and our guide (whose name I cannot begin to spell!). It is raining. It continued to rain. All day. But we still had a great time (we’re with the same guide tomorrow). Since we had been to Istanbul before our guide has personalized our tour to the things that we hadn’t already seen. So—

We took the tram to walking distance of Dolmabahce Palace. BIG lines—in the rain, we figured that must mean the palace is fabulous (it is). He took us to the harem first, hoping that the lines would get shorter. They didn’t. But we survived. I have no photos because they aren’t allowed (and I’m a rule follower). A good place to see it is here http://www.dolmabahcepalace.com/.

We walked and walked. And walked some more. Saw Taksim Square (google it for info on the Occupy movement here) and the Istiklal walking street. Along the way we stopped for coffee and later a Turkish lunch. What a lunch! No dinner for us tonight, just crackers and cheese and martinis.

The narrowest minarets in the world!

Entrance to the Palace

It may be raining but it's still fun!

One of the streetcars (not to be confused with the trams!)

Not counting London, Istanbul has the oldest subway in the world.

This is where we got our cheese. The cracker place was not memorable.

Our guide

Our lunch place

I’ve been everywhere, man, I’ve been EVERYWHERE—in Bath...

We’ve been busy for the past few days traveling from Chipping Campden to Gatwick via Stratford-upon-Avon, Avebury, and Bath to Thornbury and the Thornbury Castle. And all on the “other” side of the road. But only Randy drove, I was the designated talk-to-Penelope (GPS)-and-translate-what-she-just-said person.

Along the way we went to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Anne Hathaway’s (Shakespeare’s wife) cottage and Mary Arden’s (his mother, whom I had never heard of) farm. Both were quite interesting but mostly I enjoyed Anne Hathaway’s (but most of my photos are of the farm!). There are still Hathaways living in Stratford and they have given a lot of family furniture to the cottage so it really has the feel of being in Tudor times.

The guides at the cottage are very good, if a bit long winded: we stood for about 25 minutes listening to the guide tell us all about Anne and Will’s life together (and often apart). Gave me new appreciation for my training as a docent at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum (among other things: no more than three to five minutes at one spot)! Perhaps the most interesting tidbit (to me) was her explanation of why in Anne’s family so many survived: They lived out of town on their own farm and only had their own sewage to deal with, compared to living in town, with no sewage disposal, and having to deal with many people’s (disease-ridden) sewage. Anne was the oldest of seven and all survived to adulthood, almost unheard of in that time.

Randy in the art at Anne Hathaway's cottage

An early crow scarer-away thingy

Dinner, every day, cooked here!

These beds slept TWO!

Can't resist my flower photo!

The farm was interesting in that it depicted life on a farm in Tudor times, but it wasn’t as interesting nor as informative as the cottage. But we got to see a turkey strutting his stuff—it IS spring, after all. But to a duck? He must truly be desperate!

A falconer from Tudor times

Even M'Lady couldn't explain what a man was doing pretending to be a bush.

A dance of the times

Randy talking to M'Lady

I am SO handsome!

She explained that if the wife died, the man would remarry within six to eight weeks because: a farm can be run without a man, but it CANNOT be run without a woman, He farms, She cooks, cleans, bakes, sews the clothing, weaves, plants vegetables, repairs what needs repairing in the house, gets rid of the sewage, carries water, EVERYTHING to do with running a household.

Wish I had a video of this, because the man does all the fancy footwork!

Thornbury Castle is definitely a CASTLE! It has turrets and circular stone staircases and all those castle-y things. I half expected to see a knight pop out from one of the archways (For those who don’t know me well, I spent a great deal of my childhood living in a castle [yes, with turrets and crenelated towers and circular stone staircases] in Greenwich CT). Our room is a suite of rooms with silken bell pulls (actually only control the lights but they look really neat!) and fireplaces and thick stone walls and is accessed by a circular staircase—really romantic but not fun to carry four suitcases up!

The castle entrance

The local church

The castle was splendid, but drinks and dinner, however, were a disappointment. Drinks are a VERY small pour and the Brits don’t seem to like ice. But they were served in The Drawing Room amongst lots of candles and old portraits and liveried waiters so that was very nice. Dinner was quite formal, not much choice of Mains (what we call Entrées) but we did have a wonderful Spanish waiter who seemed very happy to hear that we had just come from his home of A Coruña. Tomorrow will definitely be drinks in our room and a pub dinner!

Breakfast was another matter. We met a delightful, very, very English lady who was there researching her ancestors, who, she said, had the dreadful manners to be born after 1815 when the Church stopped keeping meticulous records. We only saw her at breakfast but she was quite friendly and very frank (reminded me a lot of my Grandmother DeDe) and talked a lot about how “dreadful” this or that was (DeDe also thought that most things were dreadful, unless she thought of them first). She was quite possibly the highlight of our visit to the castle.

We long ago decided to not go to Stonehenge but to see the Avebury stones instead. I don’t have anything to compare it to (other than the previously mentioned Rollright Stones), but Avebury was definitely worthwhile. The stone circle(s) at Avebury are the largest in diameter in Britain and the largest single stone is here. The town is actually built inside the circle and is a lovely little town with a beautiful church that we wandered about for a while.

On to Bath after we had seen all the stones and sheep we could handle. One thing I will say about the sheep is that they don’t care about hygiene! And I didn’t look where I was stepping and thus have some lack-of-hygiene on my shoes!

The local pub

Beautiful church in Avebury

These stones are BIG!

Ah, Bath. What can I say. First, remember the song, “I’ve been everywhere”? Well, we can say that about Bath. In spite of having a GPS (Aside: do not, under any circumstances, buy a TomTom GPS! It is the most incomprehensible GPS I’ve ever used! But Penelope’s voice was very seductive.), we probably drove on every road in the city that cars are allowed on and probably on some they weren’t! Finally we found a parking lot that we thought (correctly, it turned out) was close to the Roman Baths, our sole reason for going to Bath. Quite interesting, although whether it was worth the hour of driving about Bath remains open to debate.

The Roman Baths in Bath, only rediscovered in the 1800s

This is what the historians THINK the baths looked like in Roman times

Very sophisticated builders! This is the roof construction.

Add a floor, build a fire and you have a heated floor and room.

Pub dinner and then on to worrying about the flight tomorrow (May 8, 2014), the day after my son’s birthday. Or maybe the day of or even the day before—since he lives in Australia I’m never quite sure what day it is there!

We did a reconnoiter about the airport so we knew where to drop the car and a very nice man at the Europa car rental told us not to return it to where Europa in Dover told us to but gave us a semi-secret place to drop it so we didn’t have to schlep our four bags on a bus, we could just walk to the check-in. Nice start to the always stressful getting-to-the-airport-and-finding-where-to-check-in dance.

Departing from Gatwick is one of the best of the always-stressful air travel experiences. Of course it helped that we were flying Business class. Security: didn’t have to take our shoes off! That was possibly the highlight of the whole Gatwick experience. From the Lounge we could watch airliners we never heard of—AirOne, AirEuropa, Freebird, EasyJet—take off while we savored a free breakfast more than equal to the one that would have cost us 15£ each at the hotel.

But then we got on Turkish Air! Wow! If I had known we could have flown from LAX to IST non-stop we might not have done the cruise! We had impeccable service, great food, plentiful drinks, beautiful stewardi—OK, OK, Yolanda, Flight Attendants!—and, are you ready for this? METAL utensils! Knives, even. And forks! Oh be still my heart!

Lunch was: Assorted Turkish appetizers (I thought they were the whole lunch) like artichoke hearts and feta cheese and brie and sliced chicken and tabouleh and tomato salad and hot breads. That was all I ate but still to come was a grilled beef fillet with eggplant puree (delicious!) and rice plus a Homemade (!?) chocolate and hazelnut mousse cake. I am totally spoiled for ever flying coach again! Until I see the price, that is!

Lunch on Turkish Air

There is snow on the mountains in Europe! So pretty and so cold. I hope the valleys are warmer! Either that or I didn’t bring enough warm clothes!

If all goes well in Istanbul, we will be met by a driver to take us to the hotel and then two days of sightseeing before we meet up with our tour group the evening of May 10, two days from now.

I really hate to fly. Not because I’m afraid, but because it is such a huge hassle. From the undressing to the no-liquids to the long lines it is just plain awful. Unfortunately, I can remember the times when it was actually fun to fly somewhere. I can remember last minute decisions to go someplace. Even to international places like London or Sydney. And being able to go to the gate to meet your friends or family coming to visit. And empty seats! No longer. Really sad that air travel is such a difficult thing to do now.

But Istanbul beckons!