A Slice of Turkey

So our current honeymoon focus is now Turkey. Insert my father's more than likely corny poultry joke here. Tooling around on the internet, in my quest to find a cheaper way to have an amazing honeymoon, I came upon European Destinations, which is actually a very cool website. It allows for multiple city bookings. On it, I found an interesting itinerary including Dubai, Istanbul and Athens. A full-fledged mostly inclusive close to nine night honeymoon seems to be able to be had at about $5,000. This is a heck of a lot less than what we were finding for Morocco (I think this is mainly based upon airfare).

So this got us thinking. I mentioned it to a few friends. Dubai got a few interesting reactions, but over all the more I thought about it, the more excited I became. Yesterday, Arthur and I set ourselves down in the corner of the Bible section of Barnes and Noble (by the way, if you are looking for the King James version B&N is not the place to go) and poured through the travel guides on the UAE, Turkey and Greece. We read up on Dubai and while interesting, I wasn't sure it was where I wanted us to spend our honeymoon. Beyond that, it is cheaper to stay in one country. While Arthur really wanted to go to Greece, it seemed the most frugal to stick with Turkey.

I have often heard that Turkey is the poor person's Greece. Besides, the more I find out about ancient ruins, bazaars, Turkish baths (eyebrow wiggle), small seaside towns and look at the photos of the Bosphorus, "fairy chimneys," calcium cliffs and natural rock castles, the more I want to spend our honeymoon there.

We have gotten a few quotes from some tour agencies and right now we are leaning towards one that is based out of Turkey called Online Turkey Tours





(note: they have that ever present logo that seems to be on every New York City bus). I like that they are Turkish (does the logo make it more legit or am I just a sucker for marketing?) and they seem very accommodating.

It is not a "tour" tour, they just arrange everything for you, which is another great thing. Anyway, it is my current obsession. Arthur is probably sick of all the e-mail updates and findings, but he's taking it all in stride.

After all, in about four months, he is marrying me.