Friday July 14, 2023
Man this airport is freggin huge. The halls are wide, the ceilings tall, and walked on around 8 fast walkers to get to customs. There was no one in the customs lines as they had around 15 customs people working and I guess most people didn’t make the walk? We’ll stood in front of a camera and got our picture taken, and then made our way down to collect our bags. We collected them on 21b. The have over 20 baggage round abouts and have a B section? Heck yeah man? Anywho it feels like one of the biggest airports I’ve been too.
All of our bags arrived. We could only check in 4 for them for some reason when we boarded the plane? Lame. But many bags came off onto the round about looking for their owner with no one to collect them? I put two bags on the rolly bag, and pack mule the other two. Fiona has her bag. 4:1 sounds right for a good travel recipe. Anywho we all Nemo our way to door 14 through this ocean of an airport. Found it? We walk outside don’t see a sign but instead a bunch of boards with numbers. We stand around and I walk back and ask for G55. Bingo! We have a winner. I shake a man’s hand and says our car will be here is 5-10 minutes. It is humid hot, and 8:30pm. A man came to fetch us, we went down to a man with a van. It had 6 seats. 3 facing the correct way and 3 facing backwards. I got the backwards facing seats and those that get car sick sat like normal people. Lawson offered to sit with me but we declined his offer given his track record of transportation.
It was a hour drive, and reminds me of Tijuana, but with hills. Lots of hills and people. We make it to the Sirkeci Mansion Hotel. We get a tour, and the elevator does not fit all four of us with luggage on our backs, but we squeeze in. The kids are in 1307 and we are in 1306. The walls are paper thin, and can hear the kids in the room across from us. The bathrooms are connected via air duct.
We walked to to the terrace and took in the city and heard the last prayer of the evening with shiny lights and all while I had a beer. The terrace bar closed at 11.
Saturday July 15, 2023
It is 9:20 and a flocked of sea gulls just rained down on us. I got up at 8:30 to catchup of yesterday’s events. Today is swim champs. Lawson got a water bottle for the funny awards, and Niamh received a diaper. Poor baby. It is now 10:20 so need to shower and eat.
The shower, I mean Turkish Bath, was quite nice. We packed our junk up by 11, and ventured out to try and find a pharmacy. They were all shut. We circled back to the roof top in and the kids had steak and I had a cheese pita with two beers. I paid a little less than 3000 lira for lunch. We saw a park and moseyed over to it in for a stroll. We circled around and left one of our bags at the hotel.
The little van driver dropped us off at the most furthest place from the Turkish Airlines Businesss class. The most interesting thing was we had to go through pre-security even to get into the airport in the first place. So we did that and then walked and walked to L and managed to get into the line heading back to the United States, so we popped back over to the ‘international’ line. We got our tickets and arrived so early our flight was not even on the board. We went through customs and made our way to C1 to the business class lounge. Lawson proceeded to chug 3 apple juices. I had an espresso, Turkish Coffee, and an orange soda. Niamh had a salad twice, little meats (3 beef, 1 chicken), and Pepsi. Our flight 567 popped on the board and we trekked to the gate F3. We went through the super fancy stores and Niamh’s little tail wagged and wagged as we walked through – a happy little puppy. We made it to the gate and were the first on, but the plane was late leaving. Lame. I was not well enough to have a beer but niamh and I did stay up the entire flight in row 1a and 1b. Fiona and Lawson were back in 4a and 4b. Apparently Lawson fell asleep for 3 hours which was good. Any we arrived to Africa at 2am.
