(written by Dave)

Not planning a long day today, we were slow getting out of the guesthouse in the morning.  I think it was close to 9:30 by the time we said goodbye and good luck to Tom, the owner/operator.  Tom was a good guy.  This summer he is buying a house, getting married and opening a new restaurant – thus the good luck wishes.  He has two brothers living in Sydney but all of them were born and raised in Turkey.  Tom spoke good English but with an Aussie accent.  Tom encouraged us to travel to Soke via Kusadai as it was more scenic.  We had seen a blog from other cyclists who took the alternative route that from their photos looked pretty good as well.  We flipped a coin and followed Tom’s advice.  It turns out that most of the route to Soke was one giant condo complex.  We got a few looks at the sea between condos but I think that we should have gone the other way.

We had planned on only riding to Soke but arrived there a little after noon and were kind of underwhelmed.  From what we saw, it seemed like a cross between a working class town and a tourist town, lots of traffic but few hotel options, so we made the call to ride another 50k to Didim.  In her internet research, Nancy had discovered that there was an actual Starbucks only 10k outside Soke at an outlet mall – so that gave us motivation for a lunch stop.

Starbucks was easy to find and provided a nice break from the wind.  Turns out that from Soke onwards we had pretty strong headwinds.  According to the weather report when we arrived in Didim, the wind blew about 30kph all afternoon – it felt like it.  It was quite a slog and we didn’t reach Didim until 4:30.  We have a little more time during the afternoons now with day-light-savings time but we were both pretty tired.  During our lunch break, I was strongly encouraged by the senior editor that I should probably not stop so often to take pictures if we were going make it to Didim before dark – I followed orders – for the most part.

It took a bit of time to find our recommended hotel here in Didim (based on advice from some other cyclists, Zoe & Paul who are also traveling through Turkey – see their blog on Crazyguyonabike).  Most of the hotels are at the end of town down on the water.  It is hard to keep riding down the hill through town not know what you are going to find at the bottom.  No hotels would have meant climbing back up the hill and at close to 100k today (our longest ride since leaving France), neither of us needed another climb.  Once we located it, the Kent Hotel turned out fine.  The room is decent, with a fridge and wi-fi.

We didn’t go far for dinner, hitting the bistro just next door.  Both of us had brekkie for dinner, with Nancy trying an egg and bacon roll.  It was ok, not as good as Australia, but better than some we had in SE Asia.  The owner claimed that the bacon and sausage was imported from Scotland – this makes some sense in a country where the majority probably don’t eat pork.

We have another long day tomorrow with over 100k in store if we hope to reach Bodrum.  There is not much between here and there.  We are planning on riding out to Bodrum, which is on a peninsula, then jumping a ferry to the tip of the next peninsula (Datca).  This lets us see both of them without having to ride out and back on both of them.  That may mean that we have to spend an extra day or two in Bodrum due to ferry schedules but there seems plenty to do.  We’ll see how we go tomorrow and make a decision later – headwinds and a slight chance of rain are forecast – we may just free camp half way to Bodrum (rain, wind – nah, probably not).

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