Trip Reports Home | My Trip Reports | Create Trip Report | Recent Reports | Search Trip Reports

Report 1701: Turkey 2009 (With Stops in Germany and Rhodes on the Way)

By The Rhodes from Canada, Summer 2009

Trip Description: The Rhodes spend time in Germany and Greece and then meet up with friends to tour Turkey via bus and boat (aka gulet), spending a month on the road.

Destinations: Countries - Germany, Greece, Turkey

Categories: Boat (Canal/Sail); Hotels/B&Bs; Beach; Sightseeing; Walking/Hiking; Independent Travel; Package Tour; 3-4 people

Page 1 of 24: The Beginning ... The Plans

This is basically my trip journal. I always have great plans to keep track of where we eat and the costs but sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. I have noted the names of restaurants and prices and admission fees when I remembered.

It’s also a bit long, but I’m always afraid I’ll forget stuff, so try to write down as much as I can each night, some of which will hopefully be interesting and perhaps help someone with their plan and not bore you to tears!

The Great Plans...

We (Ken and I and our friends, R & G, that we traveled with on this trip) had talked about a trip to Turkey for a couple of years. Initially the plan was to get at least four or five couples together to charter a gulet for one week, with everyone carrying on from there with their own plans or in various groups depending on who wanted to do what. The interest at first was great, actually had a dinner one night last September for 28!! Yes, yes of course everyone wanted to go. We thought ... oh no ... what have we done, we’ll need two or three gulets! But when the date came to commit and book (Nov 1) we were down to four couples. Hooray, we thought, gulet charter, here we come! Then something came up and one couple couldn’t go. OK, we can’t charter, so we’ll just do a cabin charter as opposed to the whole gulet. After much research on that aspect of a gulet cruise, we chose Explore Worldwide, mostly for the gulet and then thought the tour sounded good too and cost-wise it was more practical than renting a vehicle and accommodations each night for three couples for a further two weeks. Well, came time to book that and the last couple also had something come up. So at the end of all this just us and R & G, the original two couples, were the ones sitting in the Travel Agency making the bookings.

Ken and I started out one week earlier as we saw this as an opportunity to finally visit Rhodes, Greece, which was on our “to go” list. The logistics worked out good for this along with Turkey. We started in Frankfurt because that was the best our frequent flier points could do for us. So with three days there before we could get a flight to Rhodes, we decided to find the best location to make a Rhine River day cruise the highlight, which was Mainz.

After Rhodes, we met up with R & G in Dalyan, at the start of the Explore “Aegean Sites” tour, after they flew into Turkey via Frankfurt. Luckily all our frequent flier points lined up in the end and we all ended up on the same flight home from Germany.

Once we had our “to and from” flights for Germany sorted out, we planned and plotted the best flight deals to get us from Dalaman to Istanbul (Turkish Airways) after the tour and gulet and then from Istanbul back to Frankfurt (TUIfly). Then the only other thing we had to book was the hotels for Istanbul and the overnight in Frankfurt on the way home. Easy peasy, this one was.

And finally ... it was time to go!