Travel Tuesday – 110 Days in Turkey

Today’s Travel Tuesday is a special one, partly because it was one of my favourite trips ever. 2013 was a strange year for many reasons. I met Adam in the February and had 3 weeks of being near inseparable and then I buggered off to America for a month roadtripping up the West coast…

…little did either of us realise that almost exactly the same thing would happen again in reverse. We’d been together 5 months by this point and Adam was offered an amazing job as an engineer on a yacht floatilla for 4 months…absolutely perfect…except that it was in Turkey!

Although it was difficult being alone in Falmouth over the summer, I was heading into my third year at uni and it meant for the first term I could focus fully. Plus- I got 2 really fab holidays out of it for next to nothing. Adam was provided free accommodation, food and yacht hire, working 3 weeks on and 1 week off for Neilson. So for two of those weeks off I flew out and we ate amazing Turkish food in restaurants only accessible from the sea, spent a lot of time sunning ourselves sailing around on the water and being able to talk freely for the first time in months without relying on dodgy webcams.

I absolutely loved visiting Turkey, not just to see Adam, but for the incredible contrast of jagged rock and turquoise sea, the friendliest locals serving us rather dubious “special fish” and gin and tonics which were 80% gin. As hard as it was being hundreds of miles apart and keeping a relationship going over Skype, we got through it and actually felt stronger as a result.

One of the ways I kept my emotions in check was to write down everything I was thinking in a blog. It included screen shots from each of our Skype conversations whenever we had the chance to talk, and other photos of things I was doing at the time or ones that he’d sent me. The WiFi was really sporadic and sometimes the conversations had to be at 5am UK time or for only 5 minutes at a time, which made it really frustrating. Aptly named after watching “100 days of Summer”, 110 days of Adam was born. In a moment of madness, in between my first trip out to visit and my second, I also decided to bleach my hair blonde…turns out it doens’t really suit me, but hey ho, I needed a change! The blog runs in reverse, so if you’re interested, start at the end and work your way forwards, but it was something I’d kept a complete secret until after he was home and acts as a nice scrapbook of our time across the world from each other.

Turkey was everything I hoped it would be – hot, sunny and cheap (if not a little bit tacky!) but we escaped on the boat most of the time and ate really fresh seafood, swam in the warm water, gazed at the incredible sunsets and enjoyed each others company after months apart!