Roadtrip: Trabzon, Sumela Monastery

 

I am quite behind with sharing our 5000km road trip that has ended a few days ago. However I will slowly catch up!

Hidden between the green high mountains (at about 1200 meters) near Trabzon is the Greek Orthodox Sumela Monastery (Sümela Manastırı). 

My mother went here about 25 years ago when there was no one, entry was free and you could reach by car very closely. Now you have to leave your car at an expensive parking spot and pay for a bus to take you up and then walk the last 800 meters upstairs. 

 It is not suitable to visit if you can't walk well. We went during high season and it was very crowded, I'm sure it is better to visit in Fall. Unfortunately the monastery has felt victim to a horrible renovation which pretty much ruined it. 

The walk to it is right in the green mountains which was beautiful and the monastery must have been breath taking back in the day. 

I found the amount of people and the state of the place off-putting but am glad l did visit as it is a very unique place and a UNESCO world heritage site.

Roadtrip: Sinop, Black Sea

My first impression of the Black Sea. And it was bright blue and tropical looking. Not at all what I expected. I do know that the weather and area of the Black Sea gives different sceneries.

I absolutely loved Sinop, situated on a Peninsula it was entirely surrounded by the Sea. On the tip of the Peninsula, there was no one and the mountains were high creating a dramatic height difference between the sea.

The town center was full of part of a castle, sporadically shattered all over town, it must have been impressive back in the day.

I loved the parts where no one was present, as where people are, noise and trash follow. The tip was so quiet and roughly natural, just perfect.

There was some adorable wild donkeys just enjoying the sun.

We are already much further away, I'm behind with blogging, hotel wifi is not the best but I'll catch up and show you are high points of our trip. We are now in Georgia, after traveling the Turkish Black Sea coast for a few days it is time to explore this country, which is a neighboring country but everything is so different we are having a bit of a cultural shock :)

Roadtrip; Kütahya and Ankara

We are currently on a road trip. Our final stop will be Tiblisi, Georgia, it is a 2000km drive but we are making lots of stops.

 

Our first stop was in Kütahya, a place where we have at one point lived. In central Turkey, it is known for its beautiful handmade pottery and we bought some beautiful pieces. We stayed there for 1 night and then went to Ankara, the capital.

While mostly a modern city it has some beautiful old gems too.

As a Le Petit Prince fan, I had to take a photo of this building!

My favorite part was the cute little streets around the castle. It was quite hot so we didn't visit the castle itself.

We stayed for 2 nights and bought some beautiful vintage pieces for our home decor shop.

We have now reached the Black Sea, our first stop is Sinop, which will be my next blog post. I've never been to the Black Sea, so I am very excited to discover and share it!

Tallahassee

From December 16 till the 26th we were in Tallahassee, house and pet sitting. We never really thought we would stay there, but we are glad we did.

The house we stayed in (not pictured in this blogpost) was lovely, the dogs were super sweet and the city did not feel like a city due to the number of trees everywhere. I can't remember ever seeing such a green city. Although the capital of Florida, Tallahassee has only 192.000 inhabitants and it is very widely spread so it has lots of space, large gardens, parks, forests and greenery.

Like a lot of Southern towns, it has some beautiful older buildings. And there were lots of hidden houses among trees. At a lot of streets there was no parking nor stopping so we couldn't take photos of everything but just driving through (while going from one thrift store to another :)) was lovely.

We took the doggies to this lovely park.

The water reservoir looked like some aliens had landed.

With Christmas lights everywhere, it had something magical.

A lot of streets and houses reminded me of fairytales.

As it is 40 minutes from the Ocean it is not touristic.

And it has lots of parks.

Still, no alligator seen got to love the Winter months!

We'll be thinking back fondly of our time here.

We're now in St. Augustine, a totally different town, very touristic and the house we are staying at is a 5-minute walk from the beach. We'll be here till Thursday and then slowly our trip back home starts, we can barely fit in the car with the amount of luggage!!