29 Hours

It took us 29 hours from door to door.  We left by airport shuttle to PDX.  We gave ourselves close to 3 hours, but this time the airport wasn't too busy, so we didn't have to wait in a single line until it was time to board the plane.  My mom came over before we left and helped with last minute details, like washing dishes, etc.  She's also getting our mail and checking on the house for us.  I don't know what I would do without her.

Our first flight was to Chicago.  We took an American airline with no free frills any more, like food, so we brought our own.  We didn't pay $14 extra/person for extra leg room and it was fine.  We actually had more leg room than I remembered.  We had a 5-hour layover, which was great because we had time to eat and Amanda had time to play in a small play area near our gate.   Since Amanda is such a live-wire, I tied her to myself whenever we weren't on the plane.  It kind of reminded me of walking a dog.  If she tried to get too far away, I just pulled on the string and she came bouncing back.

I love Turkish Airlines.  Our longest flight was from Chicago to Istanbul on Turkish Airlines from 10:00PM Chicago time to 5PM Istanbul time, though we were actually on the plane for only 11 hours or so.  Turkish Airlines still feeds you and they also give you little gift bags with socks, eye masks, lip balm, toothbrush and toothpaste and earplugs.  I only used the lip balm during the flight, but the earplugs have come in handy since we've arrived when trying to sleep with the windows open at night.  The other nice thing about Turkish Airlines is that every person has a personal monitor on the seatback in front of them with access to a dozen or so new release movies, around 50 older movies and TV show episodes, tons of music "CDs" in both English and Turkish as well as documentaries and info about your destination.  There was something for everyone and enough to keep us all occupied for the long flight. 

Surprisingly I was able to sleep for most of the flight, but this was actually a bad thing, I found out.  When we landed I discovered that my feet had swollen to almost twice their regular size because since I was sleeping, I wasn't walking around or drinking anything. 

Originally we were supposed to have a 5-hour layover in Istanbul before our next flight to Bodrum.  We now had only one hour before we needed to check in for our next flight.  It took 20 minutes just to disembark the plane.  Then we had to get our visas.  We got in the passport line and after 20 minutes of moving slowly up through the line, we discovered that we were in the wrong line.  We needed to be in the visa line.  It's good having a Turkish speaker in the group.  Nev was able to explain that we were in a hurry to make our next flight and the official had the kids and I wait at the side while Nev ran over to the long visa line.  Once he had our 3-month visas, we got to go to the front of the line to have our passports stamped.

Next was baggage claim.  We quickly found our bags.  I had stuck monkey stickers on all of our bags so we could find them quickly.  On to Customs with about 20 minutes until we were supposed to check in.  This part was amazing.  I didn't even know we were there when a couple of our bags fell off our cart.  An official helped Nev put them back on the cart and that was it.  We were through Customs. Now we needed to check our bags.  Problem.  We went to the wrong line again.  The clerk tried very hard to find our flight but we had changed it and didn't have a paper receipt, so she couldn't find it.  We needed to go to another line to get it settled.  Now we were past the check-in time, so I thought we were going to miss our flight.  We finally got the tickets straightened out and got our boarding passes, raced through security--they didn't even make me take anything out of my backpack because we were about to miss our flight--and boarded the plane with about ten minutes before takeoff.  Whew!

This flight was only about an hour and seemed like less.  We were in Bodrum!  While we were waiting for our luggage, Nev went to the Duty Free shop for Raki, and an airport guy called out, "Okyay!"  He wanted us to follow him because our luggage was in a different place because we got on the plane so late.  We got Nev and our luggage and now we had to figure out how to get to Akbük.  The plan was to find a shuttle for the 45-minute ride.  Raif to the rescue!  Nev's brother-in-law Raif had hired Ali, the plumber who had a van, to drive us and Raif to Akbük.

29 Hours.  Home at last!