The Agenda

It's been almost a year since my last big trip, so I'm overdue. To be honest, I'm not sure how much I'll blog this time as I'm traveling with my great and awesome girlfriend, Jaimie Graham, and shall soon find out if she's also a great and awesome travel companion. I tend to write a lot much less when not traveling solo, but the writing bug just finally bit me again the other day, so I figured I'd at least set one up and see what happened.


Itinerary for the next few weeks is as follows:

• Spend the morning logged into work hastily wrapping up what I can before I have to just dump what's left on the poor sods manning the fort while I'm gone. It's been a crazy last couple weeks.
   
• The 'rents are kindly picking us up in the afternoon to drive to the airport where, if the volcano erupting in Iceland can hold off on spewing any ash for another 24 hours, and the pilots in our layover city of Frankfurt don't call another short term strike, and the snow in Calgary stops long enough to let us take off, we may actually arrive in Istanbul some time the next afternoon.

• 2 days on our own there before meeting yet another G Adventures group (my 5th I think) where we'll do the semi-circle of purple dots above that fall inside Turkey's border. Highlights should be this:
  
  
  
  and this:
  
  
  
  and this:
  
  
  
  and a plethora of other things I'm sure. Turkey's a big country apparently, so we've got a non-trivial amount of 4-8 hour bus rides, that won't exactly be highlights for me. But a good chance to see the country-side/nap/blog I guess.
   
• Oh, and the ruins of Ephesus, which a friend told me was even better than Rome's, so I'm pretty stoked to see that!
  
   

And then there was Greece...

• On about day 10 or 11, we'll branch off from the group and rather than complete the circle, make our own way to the shoreline to catch a ferry to the Greek island of Samos, where we'll catch another ferry to famous Island of Mykonos.
   
• At least, that would be true, if ALL the information on the ENTIRE INTERNET about the ferry that makes that trip YEAR ROUND were actually still accurate. We found out AFTER we booked all our other Greek accommodations it now apparently stops running exactly 10 days before we need it to be there, so instead we'll have a much more expensive flight via an overnight layover in Athens. Fun.
  
   
• I really shouldn't complain though because after we check out the scene in Mykonos for 1 night, we'll spend 2 days soaking up the ambiance on the traditional island of Naxos, before relaxing for 3 days on picturesque Santorini... you know, the one you see in every postcard picture of Greek Islands:
  
  
• We'll then have 1 more day in Athens, which should be just enough time to thoroughly inspect the Acropolis, before boarding a flight for home.

Should be a good time I presume. Maybe I'll post some updates along the way. 

PS. you see on that map, the long-ish lake just over from Aleppo? Ya, that's ISIS held territory now. It's about 400KMs away from where we'll get to though, which is like the equivalent of saying Jasper has been occupied and that's... actually, when I say it that way, it sounds kinda close doesn't it?

Meh, I'm sure we'll be fine.