Happy Returns

It is Zoe's birthday (we celebrated the birthday over the last two evenings) and our final morning in Kalkan. We were awake early and by 07:15, I had everything packed and ready to go and was making my first coffee of the day. I stood on the patio to watch the nun poke its head above the mountains just to the east of us, it was a wonderful site seeing the rays as they spread down through the valley to the sea.

As the time ticked around towards 08:00, everyone was up and it was all hands to the pump as the villa was given a good clean and tidy, and luggage started to accumulate in the lounge. My little digital scales did sterling work ensuring all bags were well within their weight limits. We had to check out of the villa by 10:00 but were able to store our luggage in the annexe until the airport transfer.

We called a couple of taxis to take us down into town for the last time. Unfortunately, Diane managed to leave her phone in the back of the taxi when we went down to the old town. This caused a bit of a panic. We contacted our tame taxi driver, Mohammed, and he contacted his mate who actually drove the taxi that we came down in and 15 minutes later he turned up at the taxi rank and the phone was recovered thank goodness. 

We stopped for breakfast and some drinks at Café Merkez down in the old town. From our seats we could see a purveyor of fine leather goods across the street. When we had finished our drinks, Diane and I wandered across and we bought an early anniversary present… I even managed to haggle a better price as it was for our 51st Anniversary.

We returned to the taxi rank and took a ride back up to the villa. We retrieved our luggage and awaited our airport transport. A 16-seat Mercedes Sprinter turned up and was soon loaded.  The transfer started at 12:45 and wove its way through the mountains back to Dalaman. We arrived at the airport by 14:40 and everything went through smoothly. They seemed very security conscious as we actually had to go through several separate security scans as we made our way to the gate. The plane took off on time and landed about 30 minutes early. Gatwick was at its most benign. Passport control was very quick and baggage collection was no more than about 5 minutes. We left the terminal and Darren's friend appeared with his minibus to collect us. Everything ran like clockwork.

(I should point out that Kim and Jon were on a different flight from us and were due a bit later. They planned to get the train back to Chichester).

Back home we all said one last Happy Birthday to Zoe and bid our farewells. We walked around the corner, made a cup of tea, and started unpacking. This would have gone smoothly if the combination on Diane's suitcase hadn't refused to open or even bet rest. In the end, I had to resort to some tin-snips to cut the zip tags off so the contents could be accessed.

We've just dropped into bed... and it is so nice to be back in our own bed.