On the road AGAIN

This week we decided we'd spend the weekend at home.  The last two weekends we spent in Greece; which meant a lot of time driving (often because we were lost).

So Cam and I got up Saturday morning, said good bye to the kids and headed for Silivre which is a town this side of Istanbul.  It's a three hour drive. One Way. 

In Silivre we found a boat dealership and spent about half an hour discussing boats and drinking chai with "Ali" using Cam's Turkish, Ali's English and Google Translate.  We had a few laughs and came away quite pleased with ourselves.  By two we'd found a nice little restaurant to have lunch in. We had a lovely lunch.  Afterwards we went hunting for the boat dealerships on our list.
 
Roads in Turkey don't run at right angles like they do in Alberta.  Cloverleafs are a rarety.  Once you get off the 4 lane divided highway you have to find a different access to get back on.  Signs in the little towns along the way are sometimes not so helpful. Signs identifying the names of streets are sometimes printed on buildings or in most cases are nonexistant. Yesterday we went around a traffic circle twice because the sign for our destination was pointed at the ground! 

A few minutes later later we got into a convey of cars following a large dump truck. We weren't sure we were on the right path.  The signs for the four lane (D100) petered out and the street became a narrow one lane with apartment blocks on either side. Suddenly there was the sound of  crunching cars and the convey came to a halt.  People poured out onto the street to have a look and the honking behind us increased.  The dump truck hit a car turning onto the street. We were blocked in with no where to turn around.  There were many cars behind us.  Eventually someone came out and started to direct traffic so cars could back up and turn onto a side street. Now we were completely lost because we were off the path with the signs and the streets were a maze of dead ends, and blocked lanes.  So we resorted to rolling down the window and calling out to pedestrians who used hand gestures to tell us which way to turn!

Back on the four lane Cam spied one of the boat dealers we wanted to visit.  It took us twenty more minutes to get there because it was on the far side of the lanes going in the opposite direction.  When we got there, two dogs and a Dikkat Kopek Var  (beware of the dog) sign were the first things I saw. Inside a young man shrugged his shoulders at our questions.  His boss wasn't in and he couldn't help us.

We stopped again when we saw a HONDA sign, but it turned out this fellow was repairing engines not selling boats.  When I asked him, in my rudimentary Turkish, where we could find boats for sale he said 7 K - turn right or left.  It sounded so helpful.  And he winked at me when I left ... I shoud'a known.

We spent another hour driving around looking for another dealership and finally gave up about 4 pm.  One the way home we stopped at a mall.  Cam went into Technosa and bought a GPS.  Hopefully our days of being lost and misdirected are over.  Although that might take all the fun out of it!