Friday 29th January - Adana to Ankara

A good breakfast finally and Anne regained some of her appetite, although she still isn’t a hundred percent.  It was back on the motorway up through the snow covered mountains to the north, via a 1500m pass onto the 1000m high Anatolian plateau.

After a sub-£1 toll, the motorway gave way to two lane highway, but we continued to make good time (even accounting for having to dodge the flocks of birds blocking the road) and reached the capital, Ankara, by late afternoon after driving about 500km.

We had a bit of trouble finding our hotel, and we were put off by the heavy traffic, multilane boulevards, one way system and lack of road signs or landmarks, so thought we would try to repeat last night’s success and head out to the airport to find a bed for the night.  It didn’t help that I started to direct Anne to the wrong airport, requiring a trip on the ring road, and it ultimately proved unsuccessful as there only seem to be 5 star hotels nearby which weren’t willing to offer us a price we could afford.  So we headed back into Ankara where this time I managed to orientate ourselves, and after a couple of missed turns we found our original choice, the Metropol Hotel, and settled in a little later than planned.