Day 11. July 12

Day 11. Travel day.  We packed up and "Pops" drove us to,the airport. 

For a small single strip, no taxiway airport, this place was packed and busy.  In the hour and a half that we were there I counted 6 commercial 737, A320's come and go.  Direct flights from Gatwick, Germany, Italy and Russia. Our flight to Aethans  was 18 minutes.   It took 30 to get to the international departure area and clear passport control.  Then another hour flight to Istanbul. After having a difficult time with the shuttle buses .  I pulled out my I-pad , looked up my hotel on the map and found the the tram ran and stopped in front.  So I got on the subway at the airport. made one transfer to the tram and was at the desk checking in in 30 min.  I went to the my room to await John and Sandra who were on another flight an hour or so later.

TURKEY. For the past month the nightly news has been full of protestors clashing with police, demonstrations and trouble.   We evaluated carefully whether to even include this stop on our trip, however we changed our hotel to a quite area of town and were assured by many that we would be fine in this area.   Well we went out of the hotel and were walking down the main street to dinner and really had not gotten 3 blocks when I saw a group of people charging down the street  in our direction, then the sirens and the police.  Yep, we were in riot.  The demonstrators, about a hundred strong with clubs were being chased by police on motorcycles , riot squad and  heavy vehicles.  I found a side street and ran, fortunately for us, they didn't follow.  We found a resturant on the second floor where we had a dinner of traditional Turkish meatballs and rice.  After dinner directly across the street was a Turkish"smoke" cafe where they serve up,the water pipe and tea.  We got our table outside, I lit up one of the Cubans I had bought in the airport and laughed about our earlier encounter.