Turkey: Istanbul, Cappadocia & the Aegean

We spent three days in Istanbul, and it still wasn't enough. We visited Hagia Sophia, which has been a church, a mosque, a museum and a mosque again over 1,500 years. We visited the Blue Mosque, took a slow ferry up the Bosphorus between Europe and Asia, and got lost in the Grand Bazaar. Three people bought rugs. One of them had promised his wife he wouldn't. He sent us a photo of it in their living room. She loves it.

Then a short flight to Cappadocia, where the landscape is full of rock "fairy chimneys" and old cave churches carved into the cliffs. The famous balloon flights go up at dawn. On our first morning, we got up at 4am, drove to the launch site, and sat in the van for an hour before the flight was canceled for wind. Some of the group were crushed.

We had built a second morning into the plan for exactly this reason. The next day was calm. More than a hundred balloons went up at sunrise, drifting over the valleys, and from the basket you could see them in every direction. A traveler from Plano who's afraid of heights did it anyway, and said she didn't look down once and would do it again.

We climbed down into the underground city at Derinkuyu, which goes several levels deep and once sheltered thousands of people. Then we flew west to Pamukkale, where hot spring water has built white terraces down a hillside. You walk barefoot, and it's slippery. Our trip ended at Ephesus, with the Library of Celsus, and the hill village of Şirince, which makes fruit wines that are not good but are very fun.