Turkey

Dateline June 25, 2016, Istanbul and the End of Ten Weeks

The last leg of our ten weeks took us ashore in Taormina with Gordon and Karen, then off the ship at the port near Rome, where the four of us shared a car to the airport and said our goodbyes. From Rome we flew on to Istanbul, our final stop and the city that was once Constantinople, the Christian capital of the East. We raced the Grand Bazaar before it closed, were welcomed into the Blue Mosque, walked Topkapi and the spice market, and learned afterward that we had stood at the Ataturk Airport checkpoint barely a day before the bombing there. Ten weeks, seventeen countries, and home in time for our anniversary.