Istanbul!

The weather here is exquisite! It's warm in the mornings and evenings and hot in the sun in the afternoon, but glorious breezes sweep across this amazing city of 11 plus million keeping it deliciously cool most of the time and quite pleasant the rest of the time. We are in love with Istanbul.

We arrived yesterday and were feeling quite heady as we had covered more than 1300 miles of Turkish territory without a single scratch to the rental car, and we had just navigated the congested streets of the city for an hour looking for our hotel, so we were quite full of ourselves. That's when the Mishap occurred and we were yanked from our lofty heights.

Here's what happened: Not far from our hotel Ali made a left turn from a very busy highway onto to a one way lane. As we realized the error and observed three or four cars heading in our direction, we, naturally, panicked. Ali decided to risk driving over an embankment to try to get out of the fix, but to our utter horror the driver's front wheel went over the quite high curb with a quite jarring crunch and then we were stuck. We could not go forward or backward. And the cars were still coming. Immediately thereafter we heard a lot of yelling from a few meters away and then in a flash 5 or 6 Turks came running to our aid. Within a minute they had picked the car up and heaved it back onto the lane. Then two or three directed us as we nervously retreated backwards down the lane and then the true hero of the afternoon virtually dashed out into the congested three lane highway stopping traffic so that we could back out into the highway and resume our journey. Amazing. We love the Turks. Could this have happened so smoothly and heroically in the US?

We went back after we checked into our hotel and found a few of our heroes still at the scene. Here they are with Ali.

Please note that there is link on the left now to see photos of the trip. I will continue posting photos to that link so keep an eye on it.

More on Istanbul later.