Bozcaada, Turkey

Our final port stop was Bozcaada, an island 12 miles off the Turkish coast. It was a windy day and we had to tender in quite a distance.  I think a lot of passengers chose not to do that because it was a very rocky ride.  I went ashore briefly so I could say I’d been there but there wasn’t a great deal to see. The small harbor is dominated by a fortress which I think was built by the Venetians. I wrote too soon that every port was clean because this one was not.  The island looked arid and the little town was dusty and there was litter lying around.  The big excitement seemed to be that the car ferry to Istanbul was loading up and there was a line of cars as far as the eye could see waiting to roll on. There was no way that all of them were going to make it on the ferry I saw.  Perhaps they run pretty frequently.

I must warn you to curb your excitement at these exciting (not) photos. The one exciting one that I tried unsuccessfully was a video from inside the tender as we rocked and rolled.  It didn't come out though because my arm was moving around too much.  Take my word for it; it was rough out there!

I guess you can tell by now that this was a pretty boring stop.  There was an excursion that went to Troy that was sold out so I couldn’t do that one.  I heard later that the trip involved a 3 hour ferry ride to someplace, an hour at the excavation site, and then another long ferry ride back.  So maybe I was lucky I didn’t get to go.  The other shore excursion was to a vineyard for a wine tasting but that left at 8:30 AM and that seemed a little early for me.  The upshot was that as far as I was concerned this could have been a nice sea day.  Oh, well.

We played our last round of trivia and the two teams tied.  Hooray.  I had dinner with new friends from San Diego and then went back to pack and put my luggage out.