There are a dozen things that could have gone better with this trip: Delta could have cared about me getting on a flight out of Montana in time to see Istanbul, my not unreasonable fears about the dangers in Turkey could have abated, and I could have planned better than to be in Athens for two nights when the archaeological sites and museums were closed, to name just...
My second (and last) day in Cappadocia ended with a visit to a carpet collective, where women are trained to produce Turkish rugs and tourists like me are shown the process before watching a salesman and his staff throw down a couple of dozen rugs to entice us to buy. Once the assembled group realized that I was unlikely to throw down $1,100 on one of the more...
I have to admit that my first impressions of Cappadocia were not that positive. After an excellent hour-long flight from Istanbul which teased with sunny and clear skies, we landed at the Nevşehir Airport, which makes the airport in Helena seem both large and crowded. There was some snow on the ground, and a gray pall in the sky, neither of which lifted all day. I...
The end of the trip has been filled with a bit of medical adventure, as I seem to have actually sprained my ankle in that scrum to get on a shuttle bus from the train station to my stop in Almere, Netherlands, but it didn’t stop me from hobbling around Bruges for five hours yesterday and the Van Gogh Museum for two today. Bruges was quite interesting. When I...
A brief guide to one of the most wonderful cities in the world.
I will add some better resolution photos to Google Photos later, but this is a sampling of Lagos, Portugal.
I’ll post some full-resolution versions to Google Photos when I make it home, but these are some of the images from my day trip to Guimarães.
Even as I begin to catalog the series of frustrating events that were my travel day yesterday, I recognize life could be profoundly worse than hopping on a plane from Porto and ending up in a quirky, suburban hotel near Amsterdam. That caveat noted, what I did realize yesterday was that the word “travel” seems problematically imprecise, as it’s used to describe days...
Since tomorrow’s post is going to be a saccharine love letter about how smitten I am with Porto specifically and Portugal in general, I thought I should clear the deck with an admission that there are a few things I won’t miss about the country when I leave tomorrow. In total, these things I won’t miss are approximately 0.4% of my experience in Portugal, so please...