"It's Not An Adventure Until Something Goes Wrong"

The post title, "It's not an adventure until something goes wrong" is one of my friend's (John Passacantando) favorite sayings. In fact, odds are high he'll be trademarking it and sticking it on t-shirts (maybe that's irony on the Life is Good shirts?).

Anyhow, it's pretty remarkable that this headline didn't show up until describing the afternoon of the first day in Istanbul.

(By the way, as I'm writing this, it's early morning of the Monday we'll be leaving Istanbul for Barcelona. Despite these relatively minor hassles on Saturday afternoon, we really liked the city much better after Sunday -- next blog post.)

After checking into the hotel (more on this later) it was getting past 1pm and everyone was starving after an early breakfast. So we went to the hotel restaurant to grab a quick and easy lunch. They put the five of us at a table for four. The food was good (albeit not cheap), and the table was crowded between our plates, bread plates, glasses, etc.

Suddenly, Torie's bread plate fell (it must have gotten pushed slightly as other stuff got moved around, because neither she nor I touched it at that point). The plate fell and shattered. Neither Torie nor I were cut, so at first it seemed a minor plate breaking.

However, a few moments later, we realized that a fellow at a nearby table was bleeding. Somehow, a shard have traveled probably ten feet and cut his arm. Being British, he and the rest of his party took it in good spirits, although we felt terrible about the flukey shot. When he came back after getting first aid, I went over to apologize, but they sportingly chalked it up to just one of those things. That was a bit of a bummer.

We (and by "we" I mean me) decided to take what looked to be a short walk to Dolmabahce Palace (hereafter called "the Palace" in this blog post for brevity and spelling sanity reasons). Well, it was a bit further than we thought -- more than a mile in the heat, after having walked around the Aya Sofia, the Blue Mosque, and Topkapi Palace after an early morning rise.

When we got to the Palace, the line was quite long, and hardly moving (with closing coming relatively soon). We decided after waiting a while and barely moving forward to scratch the plan and save the trip for Sunday morning. We did enjoy the ceremonial changing of the guard (although these soldiers carried non-ceremonial machine guns).

I then went to a nearby ATM to get out some more Turkish Lira. The transaction went through, until my card got stuck coming out. So, I got neither the cash (which was to come after the card was returned) nor my ATM card, which was retained by the ghost in the machine. Yikes -- now we were down to one ATM card, with more Istanbul and all of Barcelona to go.

Carol quickly saved the day -- she had our Credit Union's 24 hour 800 number programmed in her blackberry. We were able to confirm that the transaction had been recredited to our account, my ATM card was killed, and a new one was being issued (something to look forward to upon returning home -- "the new phone books are here! the new phone books are here!" as Navin Johnson would say.)

So, after cutting a gentleman's arm, we had hiked yet whiffed on the Palace, and then had my ATM card swallowed like Jonah. So we walked back to the hotel. We also had whiffed on dinner plans -- as the few places we tried for reservations were all booked up (Saturday nights in August in Istanbul are the hardest nights to get reservations -- the opposite of Athens).

And now I was second-guessing myself on the choice of hotels, as well. I had booked us into one of the nicest hotels in Istanbul, the Ciragan Palace Kempinksi. It's right on the Bosphorous, and used to be a Palace. Some guidebooks even list it as a stop worth seeing.

(When I was in college, traveling through Europe on $20 per day -- good luck with that now! -- I was staying in flea bag hostels. In Rome, walking past a nice hotel, I vowed that some day I would be able to afford to stay in places like that. Anyhow, we've always had fun staying in at least one VERY nice hotel while on these trips. So, we dumbed down our hotels inAthens and Barcelona to afford this very nice hotel in Istanbul.)

Well, it's almost too nice. You shouldn't be intimidated by the staff at a hotel, and yet these people are much more officious and official than I care to be. Now, that's not a knock -- the hotel is great, the service is solid, and the location is incredible. One drawback is that it is a bit far away from the main sights of Istanbul. On the flip side, being right along the Bosphorous in an oasis of calm is kind of nice.

The palace was built by (actually for) Sultan Abdulaziz, who reigned between 1861 and 1876.
All in all, I wouldn't recommend staying here, but mostly because it is too nice for a regular family like ours. After much thought, we enjoyed it -- nice resort, cool breezes, right along the Bosphorous, and it is neat to stay at what once was a Sultan's Palace. We don't stay in a special place every night on the trips, but like Waterford Castle in Ireland back in our 2003 trip, it was a fun two-night treat.

However, since we were here, we did take advantage of one thing -- the beautiful infinity pool right on the edge of the Bosphorous. We sat out in the late afternoon by the pool (Torie, of course, swam the whole time) on the very comfortable lounge chairs. We then had a sumptuous dinner at the hotel BBQ, right on the banks of the Bosphorous. Excellent food, served buffet style with meat/fish/chicken cooked to order.

The food was excellent, albeit pricey.