February seems like it was about five years ago, given the world has ground to a halt! The month of Feb marked my 30th birthday (I definitely don’t feel adult enough to be 30, but what can you do!). As per usual, a big birthday meant J,H and I had to uphold our tradition of heading somewhere far flung, locking ourselves away with all of the food and wine, and of course a hot tub (check out our trips to Iceland & Prague!) After much trawling, we located the perfect Air B n B with amazing views. Whilst I love holidays that are full of culture and exploring, the holidays I have with J and H are always, always exactly what the Dr ordered. We pretty much drop off the face of the planet, and spend 3 days laughing and relaxing, so this post’ll be a lot of scenery, and…

After having spent most of the day before looking longingly across the river, we decided we ought to go and check it out for ourselves! We meandered down the river to kill some time, including these cute little boats bobbing by – one of the locals stopped to tell us that every year there’s a race between them and whoever comes first gets the best parking spot on this stretch of the river… As part of our bus pass, we also had a ticket to a tour around one of the port wineries, to go and learn more about one of the country’s most famous exports (I am sorry). “When he founded Porto Cálem in 1859, he set his sights on crossing the Atlantic and exporting to Brazil. This at a time when Port was typically shipped to the British Isles and other European markets. Beaten paths were not for Cálem.…

MLB is one of my dearest girlfriends. We’re an unlikely pairing for lots of reasons; and for many years our friendship was a dinner-once-a-month affair, that was always like we’d only seen each other the day before; we just had that natural, easy friendship and, happily that once-a-month thing is more of a once a week thing now. Last year she went travelling for a few months and I missed her terribly, I’m so happy she’s back and I’m so happy I have a friend like her! When the end of her trip drew near, she wanted to go out on a high, and so, she dropped me a text asking if I fancied meeting her somewhere. We landed on Porto for a bit of a girls holiday full of meandering, partying, a bit of sight seeing, and catching up on all the missed months of dinner! I was so excited…

Nothing could prepare me for the beauty of the next place we were set to visit. As we set sail once again, this time in pursuit of sunken ruins, we still couldn’t quite believe our luck as the sun shone on our faces and the conditions favoured us, hurrying us along our way. The sunken ruins are beautiful; although really this was only a small part of our trip, the real beauty came when we docked a short distance from the island of Kekova. I guess this was one of my other misconceptions of Turkey – I don’t know where this stems from particularly but I guess I never really thought of it as a beautiful place, but Turkey continued to prove me wrong. And this next place, absolutely kicked my misconceptions to the curb… Kekova looks like it belongs in a film – it looks like a tiny island…

As I mentioned at the start of this series, I (slightly shamefully) had some misconceptions about Turkey. I remembered a trip years before where I’d felt a bit uncomfortable as a woman on her own in Turkey – but, a lot’s changed in recent years. Turkish tourism was hit incredibly hard in 2016 after car bombs went off in Istanbul; the Turkish economy has taken some time to recover. We were told by locals that tourism as a viable part of the economy, had been perhaps taken for granted previously, but now that things were on the up again, the Turkish were determined to retain status as one of the most hospitable places on earth, and when you readjust your perceptions to understand this you realise that it rivals that of places like Dubai. Nothing would underpin this more, than when we docked in the little port town of Kaş (pronounced ‘cash’).…

It was still impossible to imagine anything that could quite top the azure blues of Butterfly Valley – but we set sail, lying out on the deck to watch the world go by.