After 13 hours of flying and fumbling around a huge international airport in Istanbul, Turkey, I needed a friendly face.
Smiling tour guide Dogan Aktan, with his welcome sign, delivered as he always did during our two-week trip to this incredible country.
There’s nothing like jet lag to help you recover from such fatigue. As I walked to a hotel lobby, tired, to avoid sleep, I saw my wife, Joanne, and my son, David, exit the elevator. A few hours later, I heard the familiar laughter of my daughter Julia in the hallway.
The four of us were on the ultimate adventure, one of the coolest things we've done as a foursome in 36 years of living in southwest Riverside County, an area known as a great place to raise families, including our own.
We marveled at the magnificent Topkapi Palace, inhabited by powerful sultans; toured the magnificent 1,500-year-old Hagia Sophia, a famous Christian church turned mosque; and climbed underground caves where early Christians hid from their persecutors.
I could go on for days talking about the wonders of Turkey.
Partly because I was working as a journalist and a teacher (two careers that aren’t known for being very well-paid), Joanne was either a homeschooler or a part-time teacher, and we had three dogs to care for, we didn’t travel much during their K-12 years, except to visit family or for our one big trip to Washington, D.C. On that trip, Julia, then 13, was concerned that we might run into colleagues from Shivela Middle School in Murrieta who were also visiting the nation’s capital that spring. Anything but being seen with her parents.
Julia, now a technology journalist in San Francisco, and David, a contract auditor in Los Angeles (six months on, six months off, the dream schedule) have long since left the places they grew up, a brain drain that worries many in our community, but that's not my point.
We thought that Turkey might be the last time we could experience such an adventure together before new family obligations took over.
Joanne did a tremendous job and here we are in a country where ancient Roman ruins, beautiful mosques, exotic areas, cats, dogs and dollars reigned supreme. A surprising number of people we met had heard of Temecula.
As a family, we bonded over meals, visits, their suburban childhood, games (the board game Monopoly caused major friction between the siblings, so we stuck to Monopoly card games while in Turkey), and complaining about the buffet food.
Dinner, more than the yo-yo, was the source of much merriment with our wonderful traveling companions, Hawaiian retiree John Liddle, a major source of unique lines, and his adventurous grandson Mason Perez, a high school student from Wisconsin.
We were driven by Aktan and his capable driver, Ragip Aydin. They were smart enough to skip the worst buffets of the trip, those in their hometown, Kusadasi. Even the chocolates were poor quality. Julia also met her good friend, Melissa Karakash, who was visiting family in Turkey.
The world can be a small place.
Julia is gifted with languages (she speaks Spanish fluently, thanks in part to her years at Vista Murrieta High School), and Aktan praised her rapid mastery of Turkish. She joked about Turkish verb conjugations and asked hypothetical questions about David’s obsession with acquiring a sarcophagus, one of those ancient coffins we’d seen repeatedly in a fascinating museum in Antalya, a big tourist city on the Mediterranean where the kids also swam.
I told my uncle Bill, a seasoned globetrotter, about how dogs and cats were treated in Turkey and he said that any place that treats its four-legged friends well must be okay. Animals in Turkey's urban centers are given food, sterilized, and undergo medical examinations.
We often encountered dogs sitting in the shade in ancient ruins. They looked just like our deceased friends Smiley, Midnight, and Happy. Cats were practically everywhere, including in restaurants, shops, and hotels. One has its own room in the lavish Istanbul hotel where we stayed. But be careful. As I settled in to pet, my hand was mauled by the hotel feline and by another in Turkey’s most famous mosque.
Sadly, the adventure ended and we returned to the separate communities in which we, the parents and our children, now live, also sadly.
David walked me to the lobby to catch the airport shuttle. We hugged and parted ways. I fought back tears.
Contact Carl Love at carllove4@yahoo.com
