Wednesday, January 3, 2007

Ta dah!

My flight is confirmed - the die is cast. I leave on Thursday, May 3rd and return Saturday, May 19th. One stop at JFK, then mega-hours in the air until I get to Istanbul! I headed for the library yesterday and snagged as many travel books on Turkey as I could find, but I'm sure I'll be buying some. I know I want at least one to take with me - maybe Lonely Planet, which is usually pretty comprehensive.

I'll be posting intermittently from now on until I get closer to the trip. WAHOO!!!!!

Monday, January 1, 2007

Obsessing

Argghhh....I need to get off my computer. Now that I've decided, I'm obsessively searching for any and all Turkey travel references online and adding them to my links. I need to remember I have plenty of time to plan.  The most comprehensive site I've found so far is the Turkey Travel Planner, which has an interesting 14-day sample itinerary that I plan to look into. 
 
As far as when to go, I've decided to shoot for the first two weeks of May.  If those don't work, I might go a week later but I don't want to run into the summer tourism glut, so I'll probably hold off till September or October.
 
Next move - the library.  The travel section awaits...

Sunday, December 31, 2006

IN THE BEGINNING: choosing the destination

This is the hard part - so many places and so little time. My younger brother generously gave me frequent flyer miles as a graduation gift from law school, and I agonized for weeks, even months, over where to go. I've been to most of western Europe, and wanted to go someplace exotic that I hadn't been before. I narrowed it down to Egypt, New Zealand, Eastern Europe and Turkey.

Safety concerns were an issue as I would be traveling solo, so I reluctantly dropped Egypt from my list. I thought about New Zealand, but since I only had two weeks for traveling, I didn't want to spend two days getting there and back. That left Eastern Europe and Turkey, and in the end, I decided on Turkey. For one thing, if I picked Eastern Europe I had to make more decisions and pick the countries I wanted to visit. And the more I looked at websites and books on Turkey, the more excited I got about visiting the place.

So Turkey it is...