Family vacation - something for everyone - Day 1 Istanbul

Our trips for the year are usually planned by end of January.. at least till Thanksgiving. The kids rarely commit for family trips. This year we planned a trip to Istanbul for Labor day. My college mates had done a mini reunion in Istanbul that I could not attend earlier. To make up for it, wanted to see the city with family. San has been going nuts watching Turkish soap operas since Covid and has also been craving a visit. I also wanted to see Kapadokya. The kids were not so keen. As an appeasement move we combined to different wish lists. Spend half the vacation in Turkey, and the other half in the Amalfi coast in Italy. Our friends had visited recently and gave the place rave reviews. The kids being interested in cuisine wanted to do this leg. Not that we had an issue.

After a lot of haggling, we planned the Turkey leg and they planned the Italy leg.

Original plan was to take the four remaining days of long weekend and go. Thanks to some flight timing changes between the time we booked and the actual trip, had to take the Friday off as well and go to the airport by Noon. Turkish airlines is excellent and we had a direct flight from SFO to Istanbul. The car ride to our hotel (an excellent place to stay in old town) called Carina Gold Hotel was a long one. We also ended up waiting 45 minutes to get our Taxi at the airport. By the time we reached the hotel we were tired. After some turkish tea, we decided to go sightseeing. This hotel is walking distance from most of the sights in old town area.

We were told by the hotel staff that the Grand Bazaar would be closed the next day.. so we were in luck to visit the bazaar for an hour and a half. The day also happened to be some special holiday in Istanbul, which explained the crowds everywhere and the traffic to reach the hotel.

My grad school buddy Sedat, who is now a professor in Gebsi in Istanbul was constantly in my mind. Had told the family so many stories of our time together that they wanted to meet him and his family. However we missed each other on the coms (we were both trekkies and would sit and watch Simpsons and Star Trek with our third buddy Indra, who is also a Professor). At that time I also wanted to be a professor, but my dream wavered. He must have got the hiccups when i was thinking of him. If I wasn’t the shops reminded me.

We saw shops as far as the eye could see, bought some stuff, took some cheesy pictures and were off to our next stop.

The grand Cistern. This underground water storage place with giant pillars had an audio visual show for 20 mintues. We enjoyed it thoroghly.

We saw this cat feeding station. You can pay and the cats get food! There were cats everywhere. The kids were happy. I was immediately concerned about allergies!

After that we went for a walk around the market in Sultanahmet mosque area. After some ice cream and window shopping we got a feel for the city. Then we went to find dinner at a rooftop restaurant. It was a lot of climbing to the fifth floor but worth it. They had vegetarian food. After a nice dinner we walked back to the hotel.

There were happy smiling faces so far. The next day was going to be a lot of sight seeing.

A video highlights reel..

will pick up the blog where this leaves off tomorrow..

A weekend getaway with friends to Bodega Bay

For over 20 years we have wanted to visit Bodega bay. An old friend and colleague Kevin kept raving about this place after spending a weekend there with his wife. The opportunity never came. In early April, our friends called us to join them for a weekend at Windor (same area). They had access to a timeshare. We drove the two plus hours on a rainy Friday evening to Windsor. It was a cute apartment. Even if we did not go anywhere outside and were just chatting it would have still been a great weekend.

The trips to Bodega bay, the local estuary walk, telling them about the bench photo tradition, lunch at a Nepalese place in Sebastapol, visiting Healdsburg, spending time at a bookstore there followed by some delicious ice cream, walking in the rain and drizzle through the streets and art galleries there… all of that was just extra. Every family has a crazy person and a sane person.. you would have come to that conclusion if all our conversations were overheard.

We had fun!

More pics.. The late lunch at Namaste Kitchen was delicious! The ice cream and hot cocoa on a rainy afternoon at Noble folks in Healdsburg was out of the world!

Walking in Sebastopol on Florence avenue to admire the junk art was a great exprience. We met Patrick Amiot and thanked him for his creations!

while walking around the place we saw a very real reminder of current events.

A video highlights reel..

We are all getting to a different phase of our lives with the kids becoming young adults. It is great to feel young again.. only friends can do that with effortless ease!

Here is to many more getaways! The kids are probably rolling their eyes as they read this.. but will take that!

Banff- return with a few interesting stops

The previous post on this series is here..

We had started Friday afternoon to go from SFO to Calgary. We were coming back Monday afternoon. That meant we had half a day to spend on the return.

Given we were used to waking up early the last two days, we did the same on Monday, checked out and started driving towards Calgary from Banff.

First stop was Lake Minnewanka. We were pretty much the only folks there. We did a short hike around the lake and realized it was getting pretty hot and we were hungry.

There is a steam boat ride on this lake which is a family owned business (or so it appeared). When the family showed up, we started out of the park!

Our plan was to go to a place called Cochrane on the way to get ice cream at McKays. Every person we knew from this area had told us "do not miss this ice cream!"

Thing was that this shop opened at 10AM. We would be at least an hour early after we drove from Banff to Cochrane. We walked around the closed shops on what was the main storefront in this cute town and decided to have breakfast at a place called Sunny side up. The service was fast and the food and hot cocoa were excellent. We had managed to kill an hour. 

Then it was ice cream time! The folks were right. This ice cream was delicious. It was finished in record time.

We were still too early for our flight. The new friends we made at ink pots, had suggested that we check out downtown Calgary on the way back if we had time. They had mentioned something about a Rodeo and Cowboy festival called Stampede that we might see. 

We spent a good 15 minutes trying to find a parking spot. The whole place was festive! There were cowboy hat stores on the streets, everyone dressed up for the event, square dancing lessons on the street, etc.  

 

We spent a good hour walking around downtown, checking out what I thought was Canadian crows (turns out they were part of the crow family), enjoying the skycrapers.. and we said a quick goodbye and went to the airport!

A video of the morning..

This was a good vacation. I was hesitant to go on such a hectic trip, but San convinced me to go! Good thing I listened.  

We did get COVID the day after we landed and the next 10 days was a blank! Chances are we got it in SFO as masks were mandatory in Canada and optional in the US! 

I for one am glad that these posts are delayed. COVID put a negative touch to the whole trip, but looking back, the trip in itself was amazing and we had a great time! 

We will definitely visit Alberta again in a few years, just to go to Jasper National park and also spend a few more days instead of doing a "sampler weekend trip".

Now the blog has to catch up on a few more hikes we did locally!