Fethiye – visitors and slow winter days

Sunday 29th November 2020

It was a nice sunny day today and after some productive action in the morning ending with a relaxing afternoon with some yoga and crochet on the deck. In the morning I cleaned up our rather messy spare room, tidied and sorted everything, while Tim and Luca went out to a free internet spot in town to do down and uploading of stuff. Nina helped me to clean the bathrooms.

The next day was rainy and grey – a soup and stewed apple day. I put fresh sheets on the beds, hoovering, schooling and stayed up late to call NZ to order Luca’s birth certificate. Unfortunately their phones weren’t working that day so I repeated the process the next night.

We still had to pay the additional taxes for our Germany passports, so Nina and I went to town to do that and stock up on some groceries. We took a taxi there only to find the men at the entrance wanted to turn us away due to new Covid restrictions and pointed to paper all in Turkish with a website. I thought I would persist for a bit and explained we didn’t speak Turkish and had enough cash on us to just quickly pay the additional tax. In the end he let us in and after a bit of back and forth we where able to pay the taxes and get our receipts.

Once back I did some washing, changed the olive water, the kids did their schooling and all the usual domestic things. Today the Turkish government announced new lockdown measures of weekend lockdowns and curfews.

Nina is doing lots of crochet projects as her schooling and Luca loves to do drawing. The apple carving is also from Luca. Here are a few snaps of their creations:

We had been in touch with Fraser and Judy Duncan from New Zealand. They had travelled in their campervan for over 3 years and worked part time in England. Many years ago I had taken a photoshop course with Fraser at EIT and Tim knew him from his photography time at the newspaper. We knew they would try to get to Turkey and we had been following their journey, hoping that we can catch up. We didn’t really have any visitors yet, due to all the Covid dilemma and our plans to visit my parents in Germany over Christmas have to be postponed as well as lots of countries in Europe have lockdowns again and there is just too much risk involved in travelling back and forth.

We tried to find a walk for Lucy nearby, but weren’t really successful. In Fethiye town are too many stray dogs and there is nowhere nearby where we can take her easily for extended walks. We just found a dirt-road going nowhere with loads of rubbish on it and cars coming by. So we went back to the boat to catch up on schooling and then finally meet Judy and Fraser for dinner. They had made it to Fethiye and parked up near our boat.

We didn’t really know each other well, but there was enough common-ness through sharing unconventional lifestyles. We had such a lovely evening together, catching up and asking lots of questions about each others adventures. We talked late into the night and invited them again for morning tea next day.

Judy is a very clever knitter, so Nina and me exchanged lots of crafting talk with Judy while Tim and Luca and Fraser talked photography and technology. The next morning I baked my famous banana bread – Judy had especially brought bananas so I could bake it. She also gifted a beautiful crochet book to Nina and some German sock wool for me to try out knitting and made knitted hats for the boys and a crochet top for Nina. We also received 2 precious bottles of New Zealand wine and a jar of Vegimite for the kids. It felt like Christmas already.

Judy, Nina and I went to town after morning tea to show Judy the wool shops in Fethiye. On the previous day Nina and I had seen another wool shop that we hadn’t been too – so we knew 3 wool shops now and visited them all. We also stopped by the grocery shop to buy some things for dinner and shared dinner together.

The next day we stocked up food for the lockdown weekend. It was a weekend filled with heater installation, crochet, school catch up, audiobooks, eating, drinking tea. Tim managed to get the heater to work on the Sunday and we all where so happy.

After our lockdown weekend we had coffee and cake with Judy and Fraser before they said their good buys. They wanted to go near the Turkish/Greek border to be there once the boarder opens to Greece. Tim and Luca went to the internet café and to get the translation and notarization of Nina’s birth certificate done. The next day was a rainy, cold day spent in much the same manner as lockdowns with audiobooks, cooking, eating, reading, crochet and watching movies.

On Monday the 9thDecember Lostura and Adventurous arrived back in Fethiye and all the troops came to our boat to celebrate our reunion with coffee and guess what – banana bread – and some drinks later on. In the morning we went to enjoy the marina showers again and make use of their washing machine to get a couple of loads done, since the weather forecast was good. With the shorter and colder days it gets a bit trickier to get everything dry.

Luca has quite a bit of technology in his room now – there is the water-maker and now the diesel heater as well as the diesel tank. So each time we make water or turn on the heat we have to go into his room to turn it on. I suggested he swaps rooms with our current spare room, which is the same room just on the other side of the boat. I helped him to swap everything over, which was again a tidy up of the spare room and Luca’s possessions – it took us almost all day.

I also sorted all our sheets and towels and tidied them away properly. That night we had really rough thunderstorm at 2 am right over our heads. It was so scary and blowy. It was forecast, so we knew it was coming, but it feels so vulnerable to be in a floating boat so exposed to the elements. Tim and I where up until it calmed down to keep an eye on things. The anchor alarm went off a few times because the boat swung a lot. We heard later that Lostura and Adventurous had a little bump together in the wind. But all in all we came out fine and everyone was safe.