Glorious Turkey

We arrived at our hotel in Turkey around noon - what seemed like a long trip as we had been at the airport at 5 a.m. and it hadn't helped spending over an hour getting out of the airport in Antalya (between visas and a hideously long wait in passport control - which would have made more sense if we'd had any idea that there were bombs going off!)

The road to the hotels was sunny and dusty - everything looked a little parched. But it was WARM and SUNNY - yeah! Then turning into our resort was like entering another world - huge Hibiscus bushes, palm trees, lime trees - green as far as the eye could see. My first thought once we had checked in was that we'd come to one of those resorts you only see on travel shows (I have very limited experience with resorts!!).

We were taken to our room on a golf cart (despite the fact that it was a 90 second walk) and our luggage arrived as we looked around our two room suite (separate room for the kids and a bed for Marc and I that we could all fit on) with a balcony on the ground floor of a 3 floor building.

After changing and a huge buffet lunch we headed to the pools - there was a nice two level pool, water slides and a cool kiddy pool (with a sand-like bottom) full of little tiny water slides - a huge success.

Over the week we got both kids to the big pool, Stu firmly in his floaty (he'd had a bit of a bad experience in the pool on Canada Day that we are still sorting out) but Mademoiselle J proved her water baby status by floating on her water wings alone...

Friday we got a taxi into the nearest town (Belek) for a couple of hours - there really wasn't much to see besides stores selling jewellery and knock-off purses, shoes and clothes. But having heard about the bombs we had opted against the day trip to the market in Antalya (sniff sniff!!)

Marc and I both got to take advantage of the Spa - a Thallaso Therapy one (all water treatments). If you ever have the chance to have a massage that is a combination of water jets and a masseuese/eur - we both recommned it.

To be honest by Saturday we were getting a wee bit bored - okay, maybe just me, this was a really different kind of a vacation for me - so we hopped on the little train to the bigger hotel - there were two, the larger one was the golf club. We drove thorugh a gorgeous golf course (even I wanted to get off and play!) and arrived at a HUGE hotel - with a huge mini club, pools etc... we had hoped to stay until lunch time, but ended up staying until the 7 p.m. shuttle back!! The beach, which had been a little rough at our resort, was really calm, and the kids could get in without any trouble. The pool had a swim up bar... pretty cool!!

Although the larger hotel was quite impressive we were happy to get back to our resort - it was more our size!

The next morning, our last day, we headed back to the calmer beach until lunch, then back "home" for lunch and an afternoon in the pool...

Every night at 8:45 there was the Mini Disco - the kids from the mini club (which Stuart refused to spend even a minute in incidentally) had a little dance on the main stage... they sang about 10 songs (the same ones) every night including Chihuahua, Schnappi, Chocolate... Julia was up there with all the kids (I wonder sometimes if she has any fear) and Stuart knows all the words to all the songs and was up on the stage the last night. Needless to say we took TONS of pictures of it all.

All the staff (at our resort at least) were extremely friendly - and they all seemed to love kids. There was an interesting mix of people at the resort - a few French, a few Germans, some Luxembourgers, some Brits who arrived halfway through the week, and LOTS of Russians... I could write a whole other blog on the Russians. Very interesting.

So here we are back in Luxembourg where it is miraculously sunny (we must have brought it with us :-) ). The kids had a great time but are happy to be home. Marc and I are tanned and mostly relaxed (though between Stu refusing the Mini Club and Jools refusing most every nap unless we were sitting in a restaurant we didn't get quite the down time we were hoping for).

Back to work on Monday ;-(