No kidding. It took Lei and I about 15 minutes to come up with the start and end dates for our trip, a preliminary list of the places we want to go to and even a rough idea of the things we want to do e.g., hot air balloon over Cappadocia, shopping in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.
The plan is to fly from Dulles to Istanbul, spend about 11 days touring various places in Turkey (Cappadocia, Fethiye, and Ephesus) and then return back to Istanbul. From Istanbul, we fly to Split, Croatia. We spend a couple of nights in either Trogir or Split and then head south on the Dalmatian coast to Dubrovnik. About 3 days in Dubrovnik and then it's back home.
I just got back from Lei's house after a whole afternoon and evening of planning. Today, purchased the airline tickets to get us from Dulles to Istanbul and from Dubrovnik back to Dulles. There's no turning back now!!
Lei managed to send out a few email inquiries to some hotels in Turkey that we thought we would like to stay in. Surprisingly, we got almost an immediate response back from the Kelebek Pension, a cave hotel and pension in Cappadocia. Our first choice of rooms was not available so Lei went ahead and reserved our 2nd choice.
We got a good headstart today but there's still a lot of details to be worked out - specifically, looking for accomodations in each town and figuring how to get ourselves from one location to another. Depending on how the transportation situation goes, we may need to scale back here and there to accomodate for travel time. Of course, we're going to try and cram in as much as we can - I always say you can sleep on the bus/train/plane!
