Anatolia and the Levant 2013

SHORING UP THE ITINERARY  

The winter holidays had come and gone and it was time to get serious about our travel itinerary as we rolled into January 2013. We knew that we were going to spend two days in Istanbul at the beginning of the trip and three days there at the end (as it turned out - due to United Airlines - we spent four - but more about that later). Therefore, I decided to get the hotels lined up for that city. 

In the past, we've just winged it and found accommodations when we were actually in the destination country. And while there is something romantic and adventurous of just going and finding the hotels, it can eat up a lot of time - especially if the first places you look at on the ground are dumps. With the ease of the internet and especially my two most important websites for making hotel reservations, Booking.com, and Tripadvisor, I prefer to find and reserve my hotels ahead of time. I also don't like to stay at the same hotel twice, even if we have a great stay the first time around - I like to explore different hotels - as we learned on this trip, you never know what is going to happen or what you'll get at each place. And that's part of the whole adventure.

Anyway, in 2011 we stayed at the Best Town Hotel, Ahmet Efendi Evi hotel, Titanic Port Hotel during our five days. All three were acceptable, but different. So those hotels were out. Luckily, Istanbul has lots and lots of low price but acceptable hotels - especially in Sultanahmet - the old part of the city near the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque. When I look for hotels, I first go to Booking.com and put my travel dates in. Next I look at the price and ratings that the hotels get on that site. I have found that the ratings are pretty accurate. Once I start to narrow the hotels down, I look at the reviews on Tripadvisor. Usually, I throw out very bad and very good reviews, unless there are an overwhelming amount of one or the other, on Tripadvisor to try to get an accurate picture of each of the hotels. Finally, after I reserve the hotel, I send the link to Becky; I don't want to look at any pictures of the hotel ahead of time, but she likes to find out all the quirky details before we travel (like swords on the wall of the hotel bars - always a good sign).

Anyway, after spending probably an hour or two of perusing hotels, I reserved our first two nights at the Emine Sultan Hotel, though as we would find out later, we would only spend one night there - and it wasn't even real Emine (apparently Emine means McCoy in Turkish), and our last three nights at the Minel Hotel, which we would find out to be nearly impossible to locate.

Next up - deciding whether to take the plunge into Lebanon.