At first, our announced time of departure had been "Sunday evening" (12 Oct), so that DH thought it was easily done to be sent to a seminar in Barcelona until Friday, 10 Oct, and go on a one-week-holiday in Turkey on the Sunday afternoon. But the organiser of the trip soon had to let all the participants of this group trip know that there would be a change. No flights to Turkey on Sunday, so we'd probably set out on Saturday late evening. That's what he thought would be the case. Sigh ... in the end he had to learn that the flight was going to leave on Saturday morning at 8:40 ... which meant the bus that'd take us to the airport would have to leave at 5 from here (here being the neighbouring town from where we live).
3:30a.m. --- while DH had only come back home from the airport at 9:45 p.m. the night before. He was "not amused"...
Actually, it was still plain night and pitch dark when we arrived at the bus ... and the sun was only just going up by the time we all got to the airport to hopefully soon board our plane.
"We" were a group of all in all 27 persons, of all ages, all attracted by the travel itinerary that would take us to "historic Turkey", travelling via Istanbul alongside the west coast past historic sites such as Troy, Pergamon, Ephesus, Hierapolis (Pamukkale) to Antalya on the south coast, from where a week later we would fly back home.
After an uneventful flight, we began to see Istanbul below us, and the waters of the Sea of Marmara, Bosporus, and the Golden Horn.
We approached the city further and soon landed at Istanbul International Airport (Atatürk Airport).
A bus took us to our hotel which overlooked Golden Horn, and after a time of settling ourselves into our rooms, our Turkish guide Erkan, who was going to spend the entire week with us, showed us the way into the shopping area of Galata (Istiklal Caddesi), where we could also get our first Turkish meal - as many of us were hungry after the very early breakfast and the horrible catering in that charter company plane.
The place was crowded on that Saturday afternoon, but miraculously enough, the tram that runs right through the area, which is otherwise for pedestrians only, did not run over anyone there.
Apart from eating a quick lunch, we COULD also have gone to get our hair done, but no one did that ;-).
Later we met for our first tour to the "touristic Istanbul", getting to see some of the absolute "must-see" places there.
