Kalkan Turkey Forum - EnjoyKalkan.com
Kalkan Discussion => Holiday Reports and Reviews => Topic started by: RosiB on July 26, 2017, 02:32:41 PM
-
Not Merry Christmas, but happy holidays!
We fly out on Friday evening for three glorious weeks. I'd love to say I'm organised and ready - but I'm soooooo not! I don't think I need to do anything else except pack, but at the moment everything is still in cupboards and shopping bags - tomorrow's going to be busy!
This year's holiday is going to be a little different for us. As well as me, Bill and Mia, we're taking Mia's sister Layla; coming along also are our daughter Rachel and her little boy, Teddy and Rachel's partner Steve and his two children. Rachel and Steve are getting married next year and are going to be looking at possible venues in Kalkan - exciting! Regular readers might recall that Bill and I always have our wedding anniversary while we're in Kalkan; this year, it's our 40th, so BIG celebrations planned! I'm always excited to come out to Kalkan, but I can hardly sit still for excitement this year!
More to follow ...........................
-
How lovely to have your family with you for the big Ruby Anniversary and planning a wedding for the following year...exciting times indeed. Kalkan Concierge plan a lot of weddings so might be an idea to contact them whilst your there for a few pointers.
Looking forward to hearing all about it...the possibility of 3 blogs at the same time will certainly help with my Kalkan Blues :)
-
Happy anniversary! I will be celebrating my 50th birthday too, so its party party party!!
-
4 blogs...haybo's too :) :)
-
Rae and Steve have already booked time with Kalkanconcierge! They are very excited! She keeps phoning me to tell me how excited she is!
-
Not long to go now RosieB, I'm like a ticking clock waiting for the alarm to go off! A wedding in Kalkan how exciting and of course your special wedding anniversary :D. Looking forward to seeing you in paradise :D
J&B
-
Oh I'm so excited too and very much looking forward to seeing you and your lovely family and hopefully helping you to celebrate in style. What a fabulous August it's going to be. :-*
-
Packed and waiting for taxi to airport! Soooooooooooo excited!
-
Safe travels!!
-
Safe journey Ros. See you next week God willing. :-*
-
It's absolutely perfect as I sit here on the balcony, doing one of the things I love best - having a cup of coffee and watching the sun rise over the mountains.
We arrived at about 04:00 yesterday morning. Apart from taking off a little late, the flight was fine. I had been a bit worried that the kids might be a bit overexcited which would make for a difficult journey, but within an hour they were all asleep! They slept again on the ride to Kalkan, so all in all, not bad going. I had absolutely no intention of seeing yesterday's sunrise but couldn't sleep once we were here, so ended up doing my usual thing of getting everything back to exactly how I want them!
Once everyone else was awake and ready we went down to the Bistro for breakfast. Rachel's partner, Stevie, had never experienced anything quite like a Turkish breakfast before, so new experience number one achieved! New experience number two was shopping in a Turkish supermarket - despite all the years I've been doing just that, I've never quite worked out the logic of the layout, so that led to some interesting purchases!
Rachel had stayed at the apartment with all of the children so it was a bit of a surprise when we got back not to see them all in the pool. Surprise, surprise - disaster number one had struck! Lily - Steve's daughter - had slipped and broken one
of her front teeth! A quick call to Doctor Cenk and they were dispatched to get repairs done, and a very good job he's done, too - you'd never know anything had happened. And none of this "You'll have to call again on Monday morning to see if there's an emergency slot available" rubbish!
The rest of the day was - thankfully - uneventful. We'd decided that we were all a bit too tired to venture out for the evening, so after dinner I played "Good Grandma" and had all of the children in my apartment to play board games until they couldn't think any more - and so to bed!
Wonder what today will bring?!
-
Lovely to hear that you all arrived safely and are settled in. Poor Lilly, what a disaster but good to know that Doctor Cenk came to the rescue. Hope she's painfee today. Looking forward to catching up soon and thanks for posting. I'm already greedy for your next instalment. ;) :)
-
SO glad your all settled in RosiB and sorry to hear about poor lily's tooth, glad that all is sorted now. Looking forward to hearing your next instalment too. Promise I'll do mine soon! Wasn't for the want of trying though! ;D
-
Yesterday morning I made my coffee and came out on to the balcony to write a blog entry. It was fairly long - took me about twenty minutes to write - so imagine the frustration I felt when I clicked the preview button and it disappeared into cyberspace! Today, you're going to get an unedited version!
The last couple of days have been a mix of complete chilling with a bit of adrenalin excitement ( for some!). Anyone who knows me will know that the second part of that sentence isn't likely to be about me! Yesterday was Stevie's birthday and he wanted to try jet skiing; I'm not exactly your Lara Croft type, so I volunteered to stay here with any of the children who didn't want to go so the boys went off to be macho and the girls stayed to work on their suntans. They said they had a great time; they went to the Indigo beach club to do it.
We've had a couple of meals out already. On Sunday evening we walked down to the village so that they could see some of Kalkan and ate at Hunkar which was good. I think the milkshakes at Kleo after walking through town were a bigger hit though! It was great to meet so many old friends on the way down, but it does seem very quiet in town - such a pity! Yesterday evening, Steve wanted to eat in a roof terrace restaurant and we went to Alternatif. Teddy (6 years old) managed to ask for pasta before falling asleep for the rest of the evening - so there IS a good reason not to be an adrenalin junkie!
On the home front, Bill has managed to lock himself out of the house, resulting in having to call out a locksmith to get back in, AND he's broken the bridge on his teeth and now has to get that fixed before flying out on Wednesday! He's told me that he managed to cut the grass without incident, though - I don't know whether to believe him or not!
-
Ah RosiB, just goes to show that a man is lost without his woman ;D, let's hope that no further calamaties strike before he gets on the plane to join you and the family.
Sounds like the kids and the big kids are having a fab time.
What's going on with the blogs? I've lost my blog many times and know how frustrating it is. I always try to copy now before I press post for that reason. Well when I remember that is :D
Looking forward to catching up very soon...
-
Just as well I'm an early riser - it's now 05:20 and I've been up for the last hour, waiting for Bill to arrive. This really is the most amazing time of the day; I love watching the mountains grow out of the blackness as the sun comes up behind them; it's even more dramatic this morning as we've also got a power cut!
I think it's got hotter and hotter over the last couple of days; it's also very humid, so staying around the pool has been no problem. Yesterday, in fact, the children put up no arguments when we suggested going indoors for a while to get out of the heat, so it must be HOT!
I had coffee at The Junction after getting some shopping the other day - what a lovely place! I don't think that will have been my only visit! AND the coffee is VERY good!
I suspect that Bill will want to go out to eat tonight so will have more to write next time. He's just arrived, so I'll finish off here.
-
Hi RosiB,
Hope you have a fab time with your family & the little ones.
We have just got back home after 3 weeks with 2 of our daughters, 2 out-laws and........6 grandkids.....8 and under...... great great time, man are we knackered 😴😴😴😴
Good luck 👍😂
-
I have been VERY remiss about blogging lately!
As I said, Bill arrived last Thursday; he must be getting old, because he hasn't been quite as chaotic as usual! Or maybe five children beat even him into submission! He wanted to eat out on Thursday evening so we went to Agora.What a lovely evening we had! The food and service are as good as ever and Guven entertained the children with card tricks, which they've been trying to emulate ever since - with little success! A walk down to Kleo for milkshakes (compulsory!) and everyone was happy.
On Saturday we went on the Kaya mountain BBQ trip. It looked a bit ominous, but a quick call to Erol assured us that it was fine and wouldn't rain! Oh dear!! What can I say? Well, it's warmer in the pool than out of it, when it rains THAT much! It got so cold we had to light a fire and there were mutterings of "We're going to need hot chocolate soon." Despite a deluge of biblical proportions, they still managed to produce the most varied and delicious meze and fabulous BBQ - if you haven't done this trip yet, you must!
On Sunday, we celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary.Regular readers will know that Bill is NOT the best at remembering, but this year he hasn't been allowed to forget it. We had booked both Kalamaki boats and invited lots of friends to join us, including Lizilu, Automan and their family and Shirl and Bob, and a great day it was. The weather was perfect - just as well as we didn't have a plan B, had it been as bad as Saturday! The crew did us proud with amazing food at lunchtime and just before coming back into the harbour produced a delicious celebration cake! The only thing missing from the day was a sighting of turtles - maybe next time!
After two full on days, we decided yesterday should be a bit more relaxed, so spent it round the pool and catching up on shopping, etc. I'm glad we hadn't gone out, as the heavens opened again! I've never known rain like it in Kalkan in August, at least in such quantities! We're planning a trip to Saklikent Gorge today, so hopefully it'll be fine for it - the river might be a bit high or fast otherwise!
Other news - Rachel and Stevie have met with a wedding planner and scouted out some venues, but have come to the conclusion that they'd like to be married here in the gardens of the Yelken! We won't have far to go for that, then!
-
Another great report RosieB. I can't say that I'm sorry that I've missed the heavy downpours that Kalkan has been experiencing. I'm hoping that normal service will be restored for our next visit in September. Having said that the weather back in the UK has been very unseasonal. Feels more like autumn.
-
Fab report RosiB and thank you for inviting us to share your special day with you. It was fabulous. :D. Hope you all enjoyed Saklikent Gorge, we're hoping to go next week.
J&B
-
Lovely reports RosiB, must be lovely celebrating a big anniversary in Kalkan.
Look forward to hearing more about it :)
-
I've completely lost track of the days now, so don't know which day we did what!
We've been to Saklikent and Patara - both were very busy but very few European tourists. I've noticed a lot more Japanese people around this year, though. Saklikent was as beautiful as ever, but after all the rain, the river was running very fast and high so no one wanted to attempt walking along the gorge. The children were quite happy to clamber around at the top, near the little snack place and loved swinging in hammocks over the water when we went for lunch. The only down side was the toilet just before you cross over to walk up to the gorge. I swear there used to be an attendant, but there wasn't this time, and if I hadn't been desperate, there's no way I'd have used it!
The sea at Patara was calmer than I've seen it in a long time, which was just as well as two of our little darlings were less than enthusiastic about being there - at least to start! We had decided before we left not to go to the ruins because it was too hot, so it was straight into the water as soon as we'd dumped the towels on our sunbeds. The water was amazingly warm, too, which meant that I didn't chicken out after two minutes! By three o'clock, everyone had had enough, though, and we headed back to - jump in the pool! What else?!!!
Rachel says we've deprived her by not taking her to Patara when she was younger; I can't think we didn't but she says it's not a place to forget so it must have been missed somehow.
Bill has to do some house related tasks today but has promised to be back in time to head to Islamlar and Bodamya Tepe for lunch. Tonight we're going to Agora to celebrate Lily 's birthday, so it's going to be a very stuffed family by tonight!
-
You've been far more active than us Ros, (why does my predictive text keep putting Rod Stewart when I type your name) sounds like you're having a fantastic holiday. We will be shortly on our way up for the contraband. :P
-
Saklikent rough and Patara calm......everything is going upside down in Kalkan.....blame the rain! But now normal service has resumed and you sound like you're having a lovely holiday
-
I hadn't realized it had been so long since I wrote anything! Time flies when you're having fun!
Lunch at Bodamya Tepe was as fab as ever. It was a bit of an adventure getting there, as there was some road resurfacing going on, so Bill had to do a tricky three (hundred) point turn and find an alternative route. Hassan is less than impressed with the road works; he thinks people who don't know their way around give up, so Islamlar is missing out. On our way back, we wanted to stop at Just Living, but turned right instead of left at the junction and found ourselves almost at Patara! By this time, I decided that the stress levels were getting a bit too high so we just came back to relax (for "relax" read "jump in the pool"!)
Steve had booked a table at Agora for our evening meal; Lily wanted to go there as it was her birthday meal and Guven had promised her chocolate cake and fireworks! We went to Black and Gold for fancy drinks first - and disaster struck! Lily chose a frozen strawberry concoction; nothing wrong with that, I hear. No, there isn't, unless the recipient is ten years old and wearing white. You guessed it - the pretty white outfit became an attractive pink colour! This necessitated a side trip to buy an alternative; what did she choose? Another white outfit! More of this later! We had a lovely meal, with the children being spoiled rotten, especially Lily. At the end of our meal, to the accompaniment of "Happy Birthday" and a firestorm of sparkles, out came the promised chocolate cake. Lily insisted on being the perfect hostess and sharing the cake out. I don't think she intended sharing it with the front of her new white dress, but that's what happened!! This, of course, put paid to any further wandering so an earlier than planned return was the result.
On Friday, Rachel, Steve and their family flew back so things have been a bit quieter. We took the girls to Kalkan Beach Park on Sunday. They loved the water taxi and we were lucky enough to see a pretty big turtle in the harbour as we set out. We were the first to arrive so had our choice of sunbeds, which was lucky as it filled up quickly. By about lunchtime, we decided to leave so it was back to the pool! The girls decided they wanted to go to Patara on Monday; what a difference in the sea conditions! Much more of what we usually find - crashing waves and a breeze. In fact, the waves were crashing so much, I lost confidence and didn't even attempt to go beyond the edge! Not so the others - the girls loved having the waves come over their heads, as long as Bill was holding their hands!
On Tuesday night, we ate at home but decided to go into Kalkan for a wander and to buy gifts to take home. We also managed to get the best iced coffee in Kalkan in Cafe del Mar, a treat I'd been longing for all holiday! We'd managed to avoid Sweet Dreams until now, but stumbled across this Wonka-like
establishment - luckily at the end of the evening!
Last night we ate at Cafe Vita for their barbeque evening. It is good value for money but not one of my favourite places. The children enjoyed it though.
This morning Bill and the girls are going to the market while I
get on with washing everything ready to go home. Three weeks have flown by and it doesn't seem like any time at all since we arrived. We've had a lovely time with family and friends and thoroughly enjoyed celebrating anniversaries and birthdays. Next summer, we'll have Rachel and Steve's wedding, which will give us even more special memories of beautiful Kalkan - can't wait!
-
What a fantastic read Ros. You are doing fat more than us. We've been very lazy this week.
How I remember girls and white dresses. I'm not much better myself though ;D
-
Oh how I feel your pain. I remember vividly many years years ago my son who was around 4 years old (he's now 29 ???) wearing a brand new Real Madrid all white football strip. Sadly he had opted to eat spaghetti bolognaise. The rest as you can imagine is history :o
-
I can match your white clothes stories, usually me, and will raise you the biggest ever bird poo on my daughters top when we were in Italy years ago......again quick search for new outfit to go to dinner!
Thanks for shared no your fun with us.
-
RosiB loving your blogs and it sounds like you have all had a fab holiday, the white outfit x 2 story did make me smile, but guessing at the time poor Lily wasn't feeling much like smiling, but sounds like you did her proud for her birthday and had a wonderful evening. Enjoy the rest of your holiday and look forward to reading another blog maybe! :D :D
-
The dreaded white clobber. A few years back were in the taxi heading for the airport to fly home. The driver was kind enough to give us cherry cold drinks. Hate cherry drinks but didn't want to offend, half way there and he really hit the brakes and nearly the whole damn thing sloshed all down the front of a new white t-shirt OH thought it was hilarious, Ididn't I looked like I'd murdered someone, didn't think it so funny when I was rummaging in the case in the foyer for a top that was the least creased. Looked like I'd slept in it but heyho at least I didn't look like I was a stand in on Silence of the lambs and scare all the kids. Have a great time keep the posts coming.
-
I used to travel in white trousers but drink red wine and as we all know there's not much space on a charter flight! I often arrived looking like I'd done a murder. I've leaned that I won't give up red wine so the white pants have had to go.