Origins of the Trip
Always on the lookout for cheap airplane tickets and needing a trip to look forward to after having just come back from a family vacation to New York City in September 2012, I found round-trip tickets from Chicago to Istanbul on United for $515. (I strongly urge people to check airfarewatchdog.com regularly - over the years I've found some amazing deals on that website including flying to England in the summer of 2006 for $300 roundtrip). On many occasions, you can't even fly from the midwest to Arizona or Florida for that cheap.
So I consulted with the Boss, Becky. Because we loved Istanbul so much when we went there in March 2011, we couldn't pass this Golden Horn opportunity up and went ahead and purchased the tickets for travel in March 2013.
Our plan was to spend four or five days in Istanbul (not Constantinople) and then travel either to other parts of Turkey or perhaps Cyprus - having been fascinated by that divided island after reading about in The World Without Us. However, as with most of our trips, those plans would change as we got closer to travel time (more about that later).
Since there was so much time between the ticket purchase and travel dates, I thought I'd learn Turkish. Although the Babbel application on my Iphone was great, I cannot say that I was very rigorous in my studies and so I learned very little Turkish before traveling.
(As I write this entry, Becky is making fun of me - "I love how you wear your Turkish soccer jersey while writing about Turkey").
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