Today started slowly – on purpose. We were in too nice a place and too comfortable a hotel to get off quickly. So we ambled around, had a leisurely breakfast and then went back to see the mosque in the morning light. It was stunning as before but also seemed to have different textures to the stone than the night before. We wandered around the old quarter, got lost and then found our way back to the hotel.
We packed and got on the road by 11, which is seriously late to start the day (but then we only planned a shortish day). The sky was overcast and the road from the city climbed for the first 15km from 800m to about 1050m. It was high altitude plain but was intensively cultivated. Can you imagine cultivated fields at 3000 feet plus in England. A market garden on top of Hellvellyn for example. But we are a long way south, I suppose.
After 40km we dropped into the plain town of Seyitgazi – a town on the plain and a plain town. But the tea was excellent and 2 glasses each came to a total of 2TL – about 50p. Nearly had a total disaster when I knocked over Bernie’s bike by accident and she had left her bar bag open (by accident), and he mobile phone slipped out and down a drain. Luckily it was retrievable and caused much amusement for the locals as they worked out who had the longest, thinnest arm to get hold of it. Our welcoming hero – who spoke a little English (along with our little Turkish) was the hero of the hour.
There was a spectacular mosque on a cliff, way above the town but the effort of getting there and its total absence from any guidebook persuaded us to give it a miss. We are, however, getting quite boorish on mosque architecture (just in case this is useful for pub quizzes in the future). Mosques and pubs in the same sentence is probably not wise – now I think about it.
As we left the plain town, spots of rain started – the first of this trip. Jackets, over trousers and overshoes all came out and were needed. The temperature plummeted as the thunder and lightening seemed a tad too close. Cycling on steel bikes we felt like mobile lightning conductors and so ducked into a bus shelter for cover. It was also occupied by 2 smoking motorcyclists – and their motorbikes – so was a bit of a squash. We got bored, wet and even colder as the storm raged. It is times like this when we doubt our sanity (appreciating that family and friends have reached an unfavourable but clear verdict on that long ago). Anyway the bikers finally left and so did we, tempted by better light in the direction we were headed. Eventually the rain eased, the sun tried in a pathetic way to come out and we carried on up the valley. It topped out at 1113m – our high point of the trip so far.  
More rain was threatening so we pressed on down the hill towards another nondescript town, and then on a side road to a lake where we set up camp. The sky cleared, the sun came out and the spot was made for camping. I am writing this sitting in our (new) tent (where the poles have not snapped) after a lovely meal (could have eaten a horse between 2 bread vans of course) but feeling content. Tomorrow promises Phrygian ruins and more – but that can wait to tomorrow. 

(Bernie) Today was a great day. It all fitted together amazingly and we both felt much better. It is astonishing how quickly the body adapts and gets fitter – so although in those moments of half sleep before the alarm went off my body was telling me not to get up, once we were up and going it all went well.  

  
We headed out of Bilecik in good time – coasting downhill – and losing almost 250m of hard gained height – to the valley bottom. We tried to enjoy it and blot out of the mind that this means having to gain all this height back again and more. We were soon climbing on the road to Sogut, a lovely quiet road into beautiful landscape. Not saying the climbing wasn’t hard but the weather was cooler and the air was getting fresher as we got higher, which helped.

  
Sogut was very conveniently placed for elevens’s and we stopped in this pleasant little town with cobbled streets. I still have to get used to being the only woman in a cafe and getting odd looks (well that could be the lycra shorts and bright pink T shirt). As everywhere in this part of the world, there are men sitting in cafes conversing and passing the time and drinking tea. Good social interaction and far healthier than sitting in pubs. The women presumably drink tea at home. In spite of what we hear about Turkish coffee, very little coffee appears to be drunk. But the tea, served in little glasses, is delicious and refreshing. We stocked up with some supplies then it was steeply up out of town. We had a minor mishap when we thought the road we were on joined up with the main road. But in fact came to a halt by a steep bank with the main road just above us! We manhandled the bikes and trailers up the bank and managed to get on to the road without mishap! This section of the road climbed up into an area reminiscent of alpine meadows with herds of sheep along the way and fantastic views. We were reached over 1000m we allowed ourself to stop for lunch and had a lovely picnic.  

  
The afternoon run was relatively easier with no prolonged climbing. Wild flowers were in abundance and crickets chirping. The scenery gradually changed to become sparser as we started a whizzy downhill to the next main valley that we were to follow to the city of Eskisehir. A large motorway cut along the valley but David managed to navigate a lovely back road right to the outskirts of the city. We paused at that point to look at the guidebook, googlemaps and booking.com. 

  
 The SIM card we had nearly given up on the evning before came into its own. The best hotel write up in the Guide Book was on booking.com reduced from over £200/night to £37! Those of you who know me will know I like a bargain, and this really was one! Then as a loyal member of the site it dropped even further.
Navigating cities can be a nightmare but we found out way there pretty easily, The city had a lovely feel – clean wide streets lined with trees and flower, a good bike path along some of the way. We stopped just to find the last bit of the way and, as now seems inevitable, a man asked us if he could help. We were in fact very close to the hotel but he made sure we got there with a friendly wave goodbye, No hassle, not wanting anything in return.

    
The hotel was amazing. It is a listed historic ottoman building with rooms round a series of courtyards. Our room has an amazing original panelled ceiling. There are even fluffy dressing gowns! We really will camp tomorrow……..perhaps.
After reviving and resting we set out to explore. The hotel is in an old district of wonderfully ottoman buildings. We found a stunning old mosque, next to a caravansari (a hostel for travellers) with cavernous ceilings! There was an old education centre where a choir was practising ancient music. This is where the “whirling dervishes” come from – an islamic monastic sect with strict rules including a 1000 day initiation process. We didn’t see any dancing but there were lots of photos.

  
Then to dinner in town – a traditional bistro with meses and shish kebab. You just point and they bring it! No prices and goodness knows if we were charged a “special rate” or not but it was fine and the end to a great day.

If yesterday was a taster to get us back into the feel of cycle touring again, today was the real thing. Sitting in a cafe this evening every part of my body aches and I am desperate to be horizontal. I know that I am getting fitter and total exhaustion is part of the process of getting there – but maybe there are easier ways to be on holiday.

  
But – and it is a big “but” – it was a brilliant, fascinating day which brought out the best and worst of Turkey. We started with a climb and then noted a problem with my front derailleur – the mechanism that changes the chain between the front chainrings. As we were about to start a 500m climb this was IMPORTANT. Not being able to get into bottom chainring on a 10%+ climb with a 25kg trailer is a degree of masochism I will forgo. They are tricky things – another casualty of the flight handling I think. Anyway 40 minutes later it was stripped down, rebuilt and working (well good enough).  

  
The road climbed above Lake Iznik, giving some brilliant views. Then, after about 400m of climbing, we called a halt at a group of huts. There were some workmen who we asked for water – and in true Turkish style insisted we had both tea and water. Relieved, we sipped tea and tried to converse in a limited way. 

  
Many thanks at this spontaneous hospitality and we were on our way. Up and over the top at 550m and then whizzing down at high speed on this excellent but largely empty road to Yenisehir – a dusty but affluent town. This is a fertile part of Turkey. The fields are productive and many of the cars all look in good condition. There are still farmers coming in to town on tractors, with women in the back in full dress for the wind and dust, but we have seen hardly any full burkas. Lots of head scarfs on young women – and there are lots and lots of young people. Large families are still common and there are happy children and young people everywhere, to a far greater extend than at home.
The mission in Yenisehir was to find a bike shop and get Bernie’s saddle fixed after the damage caused in transit. My string repair at the airport would only last so long. We paused to wonder which way to go and immediately asked by a friendly young man, Samet, if he could help and he guided us to a bike shop. The wonders of googetranslate! The repair took an hour or so – and we had tea whilst they fashioned the piece from scratch that was missing. Ultimate ingenuity – “Turkish” said the repair man proudly at the end clearly proud of both his work and his country. It cost TL10 – about £2.50 for that brilliant job – and some smiling photos. 

  
Then to Samet’s shop to buy sausage – which was delicious. He is a 21 year old butcher and has a wife and (I think) a child on the way. He expressed his endless admiration for Bernie who, we reckoned, was probably older than his mother, and was cycling across his country. He guided us out and we said our goodbyes. If he is reading this (and we gave him the website) – he is a credit to his country.

  
The road took us across the valley and then we stopped by a stream for lunch, just before the next big climb. The temperature was now between 35 and 40 – climbing to 41 degrees at the height of the afternoon. We were at 320m and had to climb to just shy of 700m. It was a tad tough – but with lots of breaks we did it. The scenery was hazy and difficult to photo, but more vegetables and corn growing along the road. Beautiful and green with lot of wild flowers.
The road was a mixture of old and new. The new was dual carriageway with a good shoulder but the old parts had tight corners. Lack of any ability to see around the corner did not stop some trucks overtaking. Others showed patience and overtook when it was clear. There was one near accident – not involving us. An on-coming truck came around the corner to see a truck on its side of the road as it had just overtaken us. Screeching of brakes, on coming truck slides to the edge (well slightly off) the road and no one bats an eyelid. Just another day on the roads. But they all give us a very wide berth and most beep their horn in a friendly way. The impatience is just a potential for accidents.

  
Eventually we dropped off the plateau and into the town of Bilecik – a modern, friendly place, with its wealth built on aluminium smelting. We planned to camp but were too knackered to go any further so found a cheap hotel. We were starving, which probably did not help our state of collapse, but passed the Turk Telecom shop and decided to get a SIM card for our ipad mini. If we had known the process would take an hour we wouldn’t have bothered but aided again by the google translate app we got through it and got it all working. Finally we ate and then collapsed at last. Fitness will return but the process of getting there seems harder each year.

So, it was time for the off. A pleasant breakfast at the hotel with the glimpse of the Blue Mosque minarets from its top floor restaurant probably billed as a ‘view’

We packed up and said a friendly good bye to the hotel staff and freewheeled down the hill over the cobbles of the old town to the nearby ferry port. We negotiated getting on to the ferry, a friendly young chap helping us get in the right queue, and we pulled away from Istanbul to cross the Sea of Marmara to Yalova ,thereby avoiding a days ride through Istanbul suburbs (for those new to our blog, ferries don’t count as cheating as you can’t cycle across water).

 
My inability to understand Turkish when booking the tickets on line meant I had booked first class seats (something labelled eco I took to mean economy) so we had a very plush ride!

We pedalled off the ferry and after as brief stop for provisions found our way out of town pretty easily – well there was really only one road, the main road to Bursa, a large dual carriageway but with a broad shoulder we could cycle on so not too bad. I knew we had to go over a ‘hill’ out of Yalova but we hadn’t quite anticipated a 350m climb! It was also 30 C and quite humid and we felt very unacclimatised but as always we got to the top and rewarded with a long downhill to cool us down (again, those of you new to this blog will quickly come to realise our obsession with how many meters climbing we do and the temperature – our other main obsession being food). 

At the bottom of the hill we turned off the dual carriageway and on to a quieter road for the 40km to Iznik, most of it following Iznik lake. To start with our view of the lake was mostly obscured by olive groves and we had our first picnic in the shade of olive trees.

We both admitted afterwards finding the final stint to Iznik tiring and feeling rather alarmed at our level of tiredness after a relatively short day…..but our fitness is what it is and we will get fitter, we will get more acclimatised and the whirlwind of the last few days before departure will fade in to the distance.
We didn’t have out usual rule of it’s raining and so we will get a hotel, so we made up a new rule that we were tired and therefore needed a hotel! Iznik sits at the far end of the lake and we booked in to a hotel with a lovely view over the lake. We were fairly certain we were the only people staying in the hotel so negotiated rather meanly to get a cut price (old habits die hard) – but we paid for the discount when we found we had no hot water (it is being repaired….wait 5 minutes etc etc….). So after a ‘refreshing’ shower we wandered into town. Iznik is a proper buzzing little town with the remains of an encircling roman wall and fortifications, several 14thC mosques and a musuem in what was described as a ‘soup kitchen’ built by a sultan for bis wife. We were unable to clarify what that meant as the ‘soup kitchen’ was a large multi-domed building but along with almost every other building in Iznik it was closed for renovation. 

   
 
We could see Iznik had potential for a good tourist stop but at this point it was well and truly closed! Soo we just enjoyed just strolling around, stopping for Cay and lemonade .

We got  back to the hotel just as a thunder storm passed through (so we didn’t need our new rule after all and could have continued to convince you all we are hardy types and not really here for a holiday…..)
In the evening we strolled out again along the lake shore to find something to eat. Cafes here only do drinks so you need to look for a restaurant. Unfortunately there was a big football match on and the only restaurants were showing the match at full volume and crowded with cheering male supporters. We found a cafe/restaurant which had a menu and had one of those experiences which made us feel we were really back on the road. Every item we pointed to on the menu they did not have, except for one. We didn’t know what it was but ordered two of them and hoped for the best. We ordered with potatoes, which with any luck might be chips but he then came back to say there were no potatoes! Anyway – it turned out to be like a cheese toastie with some salad. OK but we had to fill up on the last of our snickers bars back at the hotel! Note to self….. don’t run out of food!

 (David is writing this). I am writing this on a ferry from Istanbul to Yalova, just across the bay. The sun is shining, it’s Sunday morning and the bikes all seem OK.Yesterday the wonderful Geoff Elliott got up at an impressively early hour to get us to Birmingham Airport. 

  
The flight was a flight – not great but not bad. The business of packing up the bikes and getting and getting them into bags is now very familiar; even if we have not done it for 9 months since the end of the last trip.  

  
As we left the plane in Istanbul we got that hair dryer feeling – walking into heat that we had not experienced for months and feeling it had come from an artificial source. But it was just how it was and how it will be for the next 6 weeks. We packed up the bikes and found that Bernie’s saddle was partially broken. A repair job with string and ingenuity, and we were on our way.  

Getting out of airports the world over involves cycling on a motorway type road, and so inevitably, as we pulled over, the police came to investigate. They were friendly but their first question to me was “How old are you”. The implication from this immaculately presented 30 year old Turkish copper was “What is someone of my Dad’s age doing on a bicycle!”. They also wanted to know where we were going and what we thought of Turkey – so we repeated the often expressed view that we were in the most wonderful place in the world (at least until tomorrow when the geography will slightly change).

A 20km into the Sultanahmet area and back to the small but grandly named “World Heritage Hotel” where we were greeted like returning friends. Perhaps there have not been too many English cyclists staying since we were last here, so there was no danger of confusion. We were also greeted as returning friends at the same restaurant, which is frankly more impressive.  

  
I had worked most of the previous night to get the last of my jobs done. The solicitor who got my written advice that was completed at 4am knows who he is, is probably reading this and I can only hope he will recognise the time the advice was written by its quality. But QC references all done, the last of the item on the To Do list was completed at about the time that the sun came up. So by last night I was fairly knackered but it’s good to be here.

Although it still feels like winter, we are making plans to resume the great cycling adventure before too long. We hope to return to Istanbul on 14 May this year, and then to cycle South East to the middle of Turkey heading towards the Turkish Lake District.

Then we plan to cycle East and then North East towards Georgia finishing at Tbilisi by the third week in June. We may extend the trip to Baku, Azerbaijan if we have time but are more likely to be finishing in Georgia.

Lots of training to be done to get our fitness up to make the trip both possible and enjoyable. However, in the meantime Walk for Life are continuing to do fantastic work for children in Bangladesh and we hope those who read this blog will generously support their work.

Donations can be made via the Charities Aid Foundation at https://www.cafonline.org/charityprofile/walk-for-life-bangladesh/ccregno1140052

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Total from Bewdley:  4735km:  Daily Total:  134km; 1100m of climbing.

Today was the day we made it to our detination for this part of the trip (sorry to ruin the punch line). It was a day that had little else to commend it but was none the less unforgettable. I knew we had at least 130km to go, the forecast was for a continued ferocious headwind and we would be on main roads all day. It was all those, plus the most maniacal 2 hours cycling we’ve ever done.

Continue reading Day 27: Tekirdag to Istanbul →

Total to date:  4601km:  Today – 106km; 1450m of climbing and against the wind all day!

This was, by some measure, the toughest day of our trip. It started fine as we packed up having only been interrupted by one barking dog (and no humans, barking or otherwise) in the night. We were on the road by 7.30am starting from seal level on the northern side of the Gallipoli Peninsular, the Saros Korfezi, where my grandfather fought the Ottoman troops in WW1 (and contracted the TB which finally led to an early death). We began a gentle climb out of the village towards Sarkoy. Did I say “gentle” – well it was to begin with and then got steeper and steeper as we topped out at 320m.

Continue reading Day 2: Kavakkoy to just beyond Tekirdag →

Total to date:  4495km; Today:  120km and 900m of climbing

Today was a mixed day. Principally it was a day dominated by wind – headwinds, side winds, blustery winds and occasional tail wind (see later) but mainly headwinds (of course).

Continue reading Day 25: Alexandroupoli, Greece to Kavakoy, Turkey →

Total to date:  4375km:  Day total 114km; 900+m of climbing

Another day in the saddle and a few more inches on the map towards Istanbul. We cross into Turkey tomorrow and have 2 1/2 days cycling left to get to our destination. This part of the ride is almost entirely absent from the Guide Book and so we both (foolishly) assumed there would be little to see.

Continue reading Day 24:  Camping Natura (south of Xanthi) to Alexandropolis →

Total to date:  4261km:  Day total:  138km, 85 miles!!!!!!

This is written by Bernie: Today was a sort of non eventful day but also a mega day. We completed 85miles – the longest I think I’ve cycled, certainly fully loaded.

Continue reading Day 23: Oficina Beach to Camping Natura, south of Xanthi →

Total to date:  4123km:  Today – 112km: 400m of ascent

Today started with a massive thunderstorm – observed from our hotel room in Thessaloniki. We adopt the “no camping in major cities, when ill or when it is raining” rule. Here we hit all 3 with the same overnight stay!

Continue reading Day 22: Thessaloniki to Oficina Beach, 10km East of Amfipolis →

Total to date:  4011km:  Day total: 47km

There had to be at least one dud day and this was it. David woke in the night with a stomach upset and emptied all contents repeatedly. We both slept little thereafter but David was very tired and weak in the morning. We were in a motel in nowhere in particular and so were keen to get to Thessaloniki.

Continue reading Day 21:  Pela to Thessaloniki →

Total to date:  3964km:  Today:  121km (a record for this trip); 700m of climbing (but quite a lot of descending too)

Today was – like Gaul – divided into 3 parts.  But first a photo to show how stunning the morning light can be.

Continue reading Day20: Florina to Pela (40km short of Thessaloniki) →

Total to date:  3843km:  Day totals:  87km and 980m of climbing

Today was a day of mixed feelings. We both felt sad to be leaving Albania, which as David said yesterday was a revelation and really enjoyed the country. Perhaps we will come back. But we also had the prospect of a new country and new experiences. We had not thought much about Greece in the planning as we thought we would only get as far as Thessalonika, which is now only a couple of days away. But having ruled out a round trip in Montenegro (too many mountains and too hot, even for masochists like us) we gained a couple of days and, given that our planning was “conservative” (and hopefully the only conservative thing anyone can accuse us of) we are ahead of schedule. We have now set our sights are now on Istanbul so we have the whole of northern Greece to explore.

Continue reading Day 19: Korce, Albania to Florina, Greece →