Stop. Take a deep breath.
Winding down and gearing up,
What lies beyond this?
We're getting nervous, guys. What do we do when the bike trip is over? Evan starts a job, sure, but I don't have a plan yet (grad school is likely, but in what?). Beyond the job, we don't really have any plans, anyway; no place to live (hoping to start that search when we have some downtime in Istanbul), no idea how to get down there (drive? train?), no clue what sort of stuff we'll pick up (we have to take up something active to keep these sexy bods, but cycling won't be it), no ability to cook for non-cyclists (the amount we cook now for 1.5 meals would feed us as regular people for 1.5 days, and I guess we'd get kind of bored of that...), no inkling what each other's friends are like (I know some people and Evan knows some people, but the intersection is approximately 2), ... EEK.
But we can't worry about it yet! I mean, we can, and we do when we bike, but it's not so constructive. The biking has to get done first.
We stepped out to pack our things this morning, and the hotel/gas station owner brought us over some Turkish tea. It was delightful! We're planning to pick some up before we head back. He also presented us with a keychain bearing the logo and address and phone number of his complex. We affixed it to our bike lock keys. :)
Mostly the riding was uneventful. It was just hard. Hills and hills and hills and hills, up and down and feeling like we weren't making any progress... but we've described this same thing a thousand times. Eventually, we made it to Tekirdag, a pretty large city on the coast.
We found a hotel (Tuna Palas) without too much trouble, and we gathered some things to make dinner and some pre-dinner snack (unfortunately we didn't get döner from the place using real coals to roast it; they were out of meat, so we went to another place that overcharged us for crappy tourist döner. We did get some roasted salted corn, but it was Turkish corn, which ain't got nothin' on Indiana corn, let me tell you). We parked ourselves in the park to cook and actually brought everything back to our room to eat from separate dishes at a table while sitting in chairs. This luxury completed, we made one more foray into town to get tea from an adorable middle-aged woman across the street. She was clearly running the teahouse out of her apartment, and she wandered in and out of her kitchen to get cups as people showed up. When we went to pay her, she excitedly over-carefully pronounced the price: "One Turkish liras!" We paid her and smiled.
Wolfenstein, then bed. Easy downhill from there. :)