Which way? 

This last weekend has been farewell to family and friends. Our son, Ian, Sharon and his boys, Sam and Wills came up from Wiltshire and we all joined up with Debi, Andrew and their boys, Joshua, Tom and Ross for a lovely weekend together. On Sunday, despite the English weather, we joined about 16 of our friends for lunch at a nearby pub which overlooked the marina. What should have been a lovely setting was lashed with wind and rain, but despite this it was a happy occasion.

Since then there has been frantic packing going on in the Lloyd household. Jeff has been doing a bit of fretting about how he is to get everything in the car, while I have been saying he should just concentrate on heavy and awkward things, anything else could be put into a suitcase on future trips.

We are booked on the 12.15pm ferry out of Dover tomorrow, 25th May, sail to Calais and then turn right. We have planned our first stop to be Bayeux as neither of us have seen the famous tapestry. Then we will head south through France, into Italy where we will spend some time in the Eternal City, then down to the Amalfi coast, taking in Pompeii and/or Heracleum before crossing to the east coast and exploring the Puglia region. We have a dead-line of 10th June to be in Ancona to catch the midnight ferry to Cesme in Turkey. This journey will take 3 nights on board and the boat will sail through the Corinth Canal which is why we have chosen it. It only sails once a week, so it's pretty important we are there on time. Once in Turkey, we shall drive due east for about 300 miles before turning south. As we have no dead-lines from there on we will stop and start as the fancy takes us. We are planning to visit the area of Turkey's 3rd largest lake - Beysehir. We first visited this area some 20 years ago when we spent a holiday in a hired motorcaravan. No doubt we will see some changes on the way.

I guess we shall be arriving in Girne (Kyrenia) around the 17th June. Meanwhile, we shall endeavour to update this Blog as we go on our travels.