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Most likely I'll post some pics as part of whatever update I give, and given that there is no way all three of my daughters will think that they look good in the same photo at the same time, pics will likely be pulled and right there is your incentive to check back every day to see how things actually went before something gets taken down.This section will contain the running commentary from the trip, in regards to the most recent country we have been in. But once I'm able to start the next country, I'll put the historical posts in the "Old Updates - XYZ" tab above. This all assumes I (or one of my kids) will be able to figure out how to make this website work.

If you want to read about the first 28 days and our time in Italy, then click here.

The Journey Continues - Turkiye

Click Here to jump to a day in Turkiye

Day 29

Day 30

Day 31

I've had a bunch of people ask where we are going and some even pulling out a map to see exactly where we will be so I had the wonderful people at Midnight Media Group put together some animation to show everyone. And yes, this is an homage to a great adventure, largely because I've been told so many times that I look like Harrison Ford. Or was it Chevy Chase...

DAY 29

We got up early to go to the Venice Airport, and rented a water taxi (i.e. speed boat) to take us there. We didn’t realize that there was a 15 minute walk from the dock to the airport, but left plenty of time to get through customs.

We were hopeful (but not optimistic) that we could carry our luggage onto the plane, and no one stopped us, so we went through security. Given my status on United, we had “Fast Track” status in security, and when we got there, the line was empty. And although I think that we are good at this as a family, getting 12 bags and a stroller through security while taking out laptops, liquids and electronics takes a minute, and I felt bad that there was a little bit of a line behind us as we were putting the last few things through.

One thing I’ve noticed about many European airports is that they don’t post the gate until close to the flight, which I guess means that they don’t have to change the gate as much as they do in the US, but you get to the airport 2 hours early and have no idea where to go. In this case, we knew we had to go through passport control, so we went to the right general area.

When we got there, Megan remembered that the last time we were in Venice, the gate agents didn’t like the way we tagged our stroller, so we went up there and they told us that all of our bags were too big and needed to be checked and picked up in the baggage area. We knew this was a risk, and they processed everything much more nicely than our last Venice trip. Of course, when we boarded, the overhead area was huge and could have accommodated 10x the baggage that was put up there.

As we left Italy, I recounted how we got there. We took 2 flights, 9 trains, 10 cars/taxi/ubers, 2 buses, 4 metros, 2 ferries and 1 water taxi.

We got to Istanbul and dropped our bags and got some food at a Kebab House. Good food all around. Then we rested for a couple of hours before we went out to a dinner cruise on the Bosphorous river, that included some local dancing - turkish dances like the whirling dervish as well as belly dancing, as well as randomly flamenco dancing and what was billed as “caucasian dances.”

The food was plentiful, but most of our family was too picky to really eat much of it.

The food on the cruise was plentiful, but since a lot was fish and since Keira and Liam don’t eat meat and Elenna only eats some things, largely went to waste. Meanwhile, the dances were somewhat campy (the part that we assumed was “Caucasian dances” looked a bit like dancing from a musical like Grease. But the other dances were neat. Most had fancy footwork and a couple reminded me of Cotton Eyed Joe.

The dances were neat. Not pictured here was the belly dancing, as we didn't want to make eye contact (see below).

But when the belly dancer came out, our girls were mortified by the expectation that people would put money into her skimpy clothes, and we had front row seats. Luckily, Liam was half sleeping in my lap and the looks on my daughters’ faces caused the dancer to not get too close to our table.

Although Liam ate very little and had little interest in the dances, which he largely viewed as interruptions to playing cards, by the time dessert came out (largely fruit with some baklava) Liam declared the cruise as “the place place he has ever been!”. After the professional dances were over, they started pulling people onto the dance floor to dance the Macarena, and first Lily then her sisters were pulled up on stage (I'm not foolish enough to post the pictures). Then they played some dance music and encouraged the guests to get on stage and dance, and Liam didn’t have to be told twice. The one problem was that it didn’t end until late and we got home around 1am.

The water taxi was a great way to get to the airport with 12 suitcases, 6 people and a stroller.

DAY 30

When you only have one full day in Istanbul, where do you go? Vialand of course! We figured that our kids could use a break after going to so many museums and tours back to back, and Vialand was a medium sized amusement park. We got a little late start, and instead of being there at 11 we got there around 12:30.

It was a decent amusement park - two roller coasters, a few video rides where you are in a seat and the screen moves in front of you giving you the sense of motion, a number of kids rides you might find at a carnival and a few boat rides where you go through the ride in a boat and see scenes with animatronic characters. They also had a water rapids ride, log flume, a tower drop and a King Kong themed ride. The whole place was themed like a castle and looked pretty neat. the main character was Captan Gaga, a seagull where the website says no one knows how old he is, but he is the only bird who can fly for 53 days without flapping his wings once. So he seems like someonce should build a theme park around - if we can build a park around a mouse how drives a steamboat.

The castle motif was neat, as was the double decker carousel.

As Disney buffs, I was somewhat surprised by how much they were ripping off Disney. They clearly had a “Small World” ripoff ride, as well as an Aladdin ride, and even some of the signage was Disney-esque. The log flume and King Kong ride, as well as the kids section (a little Doctor Seuss-esque) reminded me of Universal. But I guess there is only so much a theme park can be, so it shouldn’t be a surprise how similar it was to US based ones.

Its hard to make a themepark without some similarities to Disney, but this small world-type ride is clearly a ripoff. Also, isn't that Mickey's hand pointing the way to the gift shop? There weren't any characters with those types of hands.

We generally would divide and conquer with someone staying with Liam to do some kids rides while the others went on the roller coasters. Liam is a big fan of the river rapids rides (where you sit in a circular boat and go down the rapids) so we did that, and I was the only one who didn’t get wet. After that, Megan wanted to go on the log flume, but none of the kids did (they didn’t want their clothes to get more wet, and most of us have been scarred by how long it took our clothes to dry after putting them in the washing machine) so I went with her and it was pretty good.

One major difference between this park and other theme parks in the US was the lack of safety equipment. Many rides didn’t have lap belts (including the log flume and river rapid rides) and the King Kong ride had an open door that you could fall out of if you wanted to.

Its unclear if Megan and Liam were scared of King Kong, or the fact that the other side of the ride was wide open, and if someone wanted to get out of their seat, they easily could.

The Small World ride was fun, in part because it was interesting to see how the US was portrayed. The backdrop included a Hot Dog truck, cheerleaders, and the Statue of Liberty was eating a hamburger.

The Statue of Liberty eating a hamburger? Is that how other countries see us? I'm not saying its off the mark, I'm just asking.

They also had a water boat ride where you saw the history of Turkiye. The one problem was that it was in Turkish. I promised the kids that the 9 minute boat ride would mean that we would cut the tour of Istanbul we planned for the next day by 9 minutes. The ride was very reminiscent of Pirates of the Caribbean, if it was in Turkish.

But by far the best ride was the race car roller coaster - Nefeskensen. We went on it at the end of the day, but I had a splitting headache for most of the time we were there, and the others were some combination of tired and not feeling great. As a result, we all got off saying that it was amazing (far better than any coaster at Disney), but none of us felt up to trying it again (any other day, we would have gone on it 3-4 times I’m sure).

The theme park was connected to a mall, and Lily and Elenna needed some new clothes, so we stopped there for a little while. Megan wanted to visit the Asia side of Istanbul (Turkiye is both in Europe and Asia, and so is the city of Istanbul), but the traffic in Istanbul is so bad, that it was going to take 1 hour and 40 minutes to go 15 miles, and we decided to scrap it. We were all exhausted so we went to a restaurant next to the hotel and then the plan was to go to sleep. But you know what they say about the best laid plans…

After a long day, I went to check into our flight to Nairobi and noticed that the four tickets we had booked through United had not shown up. I knew that something could be wrong, because 2 months earlier, United told me that our flight from Venice to Istanbul was canceled, so I called and they told me the rest was good, so we should just book directly with Turkish Air for the first leg to Istanbul (Lily and I were already on Turkish Air flights, because there were only 4 mileage tickets available on United, and we used miles for everyone else). On Oct 1, the United app still said that they had tickets to Nairobi, but when I went to check them in on Oct 2, they weren’t there.

I called into United, who basically said that Turkish Air canceled the flights so it wasn’t their problem. I told them that it wasn’t their problem that Turkish Air canceled the flights, but it was their problem that they told me 2 months ago I had a ticket to Nairobi and never told me that my Nairobi tickets were canceled. They seemed unfazed and unwilling to help, and eventually I talked to a manager who said that he could reach out to Turkish Air to get us tickets, but at this point I had no confidence that United and Turkish Air were communicating in any real way, so I was simultaneously booking flights on Turkish Air while talking to him. After hanging up with United, I bought the tickets. However, as I went to check them into the flight, I realized that I mistakenly had put Lily in instead of Elenna.

So I called Turkish Air to get them to change the name, and after a comedy of errors and poor English (on their end) we eventually came to a point where they asked us to submit a request for a name change on the system through their website (even though on the website, it expressly says that if the flight is within 24 hours, you shouldn’t do this and instead should call them directly - the back and forth on this point was at least 15 minutes). So we did that, but nothing happened - no confirmation number on the screen or email confirmation. So we called back in and got another representative that spoke better English but said the same thing. We tried 3 more times on 2 different browsers and nothing worked, so I eventually recommended that they just cancel Lily’s reservation and then we would rebook Elenna.

They said that they could and it took about 15 minutes before he came back and said he accidentally refunded Megan instead of Lily, and had to fix it. I couldn’t get angry since I had put the wrong person in, but now it was 12:45am. Then he said that his system was broken and he had to reboot it and would call us back in 15 minutes. He said that since she was a child, he would have to book Elenna’s new ticket because they wouldn’t let children fly alone. Without any other option we said OK.

At the 15 minute mark he did call us back and started the reservation process. Once we gave the agent Elenna’s date of birth, he said that she was an adult according to them and we could have done this ourselves. While we had him, we had him do it anyway. This turned out to be a mistake on a number of levels - 1) it took him much longer than we could have done it (he kept misspelling Elenna’s name), and 2) since he put in the credit card number, we couldn’t check Elenna in on the phone, and instead had to do it at the check in counter (which makes no sense, because there isn’t more security to put in the credit card on-line).

It didn’t sit well with me that he said that he canceled Megan’s flight but then fixed it, but after he first said that, the app still said she was on the reservation. But after we hung up, I updated the app again on a hunch, and sure enough, she wasn’t on the reservation anymore. Megan suggested that we call back, because he said he fixed it so she might still have a seat, but it was 1:40am at this point (and we were getting up at 7:30 for a tour the next day), and I wasn’t up for another hour long conversation and more mistakes. So I bought Megan another ticket on-line, and she said that we might be booking two tickets on the flight for her. I didn’t think this was true, since I could see that the seat that she had previously was now open, but at that point, I was willing to pay for two tickets just to go to bed - so I did.

DAY 31

Today was the actual tour of Istanbul. Working on 5 hours of sleep after ironing out the flight details (we hoped), I warned the kids that Mom and I were likely to have short fuses and they should be on their best behavior. I had made a private tour for 7 hours with the view that we would all be tired and ready to sleep on our flight to Nairobi later that day (it was a 7pm flight, landing at 1:30am, and we would be in coach, so any help falling asleep should be welcome). This tour was a source of constant complaining the day before, as our kids were tired of seeing things, and I found it somewhat ironic that their complaints of constant tours came during the one full day in Istanbul where we didn’t see anything but instead went to an amusement park. But this trip is not about seeing amusement parks around the world (although we will see some), we also were going to get some culture goddammit!

The guy at reception warned us that traffic to the airport could be bad, so we agreed to cut the tour down to 6 hours to ensure we had plenty of time to get to the airport, and our kids were happier. Megan had hoped to get to the Asia side of the country, but that now wasn’t going to be possible. Instead, we were going to see the Hippodrome, Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace and the Grand Bazaar. We had to cut something out, and I wanted to see the spice market, but Megan wanted to see the palace, so we made the palace part of the day, after the tour guide said that the spice market was similar to the bazaar. By the way, the tour guide was excellent, so if anyone is going to Istanbul, I can hook you up.

The Hippodrome was neat - it was the area where chariot races took place, but today was just a large square. We saw another obelisk that the Romans stole from Egypt, and like the one they put in St Peter’s, was about 3,500 years old, so it could have been the oldest thing we have seen so far (albeit, was only in that location for 1,500 years).

The Hippodrome, and another 3,500 year old obleisk..

From there, we went to the Blue Mosque, which was my favorite of the locations. It was still an active mosque, but we were there in between prayer times. Given it was an active mosque, the girls had to wear head scarves and we had to take off our shoes. Inside was very ornate, and the building was big, but apparently, was only decently large mosque. It was connected to a square, and if you included those grounds, it was the largest. We learned that the minerets around the mosque were built so that people could climb them and then yell to the townspeople when it was time to pray. Today, given all of the minerets around Istanful, and the speakers attached to them, you can be almost anywhere and hear the call to prayer. But still much less intruisive than the church bells that rang constantly in Italy.

I hadn't heard of the Blue Mosque before going to Istanbul, but it was the most impressive thing we saw there.

From there, we went to Topkapi Palace, which is where the Sultans lived for about 800 years. We saw where the women slept, the boys slept, and the Sultan slept, and how it was kept very separate. Apparently, African eunuchs were the slaves who took care of the palace and did the cooking, but since they couldn’t enter the women’s area, they brought the food to an area where the concubines would then bring the food into the women's area. The Sultan could have up to 4 wives at a time, and the next sultan was chosen by his predecessor, and apparently the wives would do a lot of scheming to make sure that their son was the one who was chosen. Apparently there is a popular Turkish TV show about a 100 year period in history and the back and forth about the scheming. I’m sure my girls would all watch it.

Inside the Topkapi Palace. Apparently, the sultan didn't walk much and rode a horse, even around his palace..

After that, we went to the Hagia Sophia. I was interested in seeing this because it was made famous by Cid Meyers when he made it a Wonder in the computer game Civilization. It started out as a church, and then was converted to a mosque when the land was conquered by muslims. When that happened, since Islam doesn’t allow for idols, all the faces of Jesus, Mary, etc. were covered or painted over. The building was large and ornate, but much less impressive than the other temples/churches/mosques we had seen so far in my view. In part, this was because much of the original artwork was not kept up, since it was painted over, and in part there did not appear to be as much restoration work as in some other buildings. In fact, 5 years ago, there was a movement to convert it back into a mosque (it had been a museum for the prior 100 years or so, which had allowed them to uncover some of the faces, etc from the artwork), and so now it was a hodgepodge of areas where you could see the original artwork, and areas where people prayed, and it was covered (you weren’t allowed to see idols while praying, so anything that might be in your line of sight had to be covered over). Still very much interesting to see.

The Hagia Sophia. My kids wouldn't let me post pictures of them wearing the head scarves.

Then we ate some lunch and went to the Bazaar. I was kind of hoping that it would look more like Alladin, but it was basically an indoor mall with hundreds of small little shops selling clothes, spices, leather, rugs, jewelry, etc. It was 500 years old, and interesting to walk around, but since we aren’t really shoppers, there wasn’t much to do.

The entrance to the Grand Bazaar.. Elenna and I in a spice shop.

We had about 30 minutes to kill before we had to catch a taxi to the airport, so our guide brought us to a carpet store. It was potentially the most interesting part of the tour, as we saw how they made the rugs by hand (I still don’t see how they were doing it), and talked about what it took to make a rug. Apparently, if you want to see if a rug is actually hand made, you need to look at it from one long end, and then walk to the other side of the rug and see the other. If its handmade, the colors will look different from each side. It was almost like a magic trick when they turned the rugs around for us. As you might expect, they tried to sell us some rugs and if we didn't have a plane to catch, I'm 100% sure we would have bought one.

We now know the secret to telling if it is a handmade carpet or not, so don't try to fool us.

From there we went to the airport. It only took a little over an hour, and we checked the bags, got Elenna checked in, and through customs without too much trouble (its always some amount of trouble with all the people, tickets, bags, suitcases, etc,). When we entered the airport, we went to see if we could get into the lounge.

Megan and I have enough status that we can each bring 1 guest, and we were hoping they would take pity on us and let everyone in. The wouldn’t but eventually we got them to let 2 guest + Liam, so only Keira couldn’t come in. My plan was to steal as much water as possible (remember that I love free water) and then leave. But the food options looked interesting, so we decided to stay and told Keira to get her own dinner (which she got at Shake Shake. Did you know that Shake Shack started in Istanbul? That’s probably because it didn’t).

We refilled our water bottles and then probably took another 10 bottles with us (acutely concerned that we shouldn’t be drinking tap water in Kenya) and ate a bunch of good Turkish food. The lounge even had a kids play area, complete with an airplane that the kids could climb into.

Liam loved the kids club in the Turkish Airlines lounge.

We boarded the flight, and the plan had 2 seats by the window, so we sat 2, 2, 2. The timing was weird, since we would be landing at 1:30am, you didn’t necessarily want to sleep on the flight, but you kind of did, so Liam and I tried our best to sleep, but as he lay on me, his feet jutted out into the aisle. So I held his feet in for the first couple hours of the flight, before that got too annoying and I had him sit up, and lean on me, instead of laying on me. But there really wasn’t any way to get comfortable. It seemed like most of the rest of the family stayed up on the flight, so when we got to the hotel around 2:30am (after going through the slowest customs experience ever), the plan was to sleep in and have a lazy day at the hotel.

Checking in during our first night..