Turkey and Istanbul!

Yesterday we hit the beach at the Black Sea in Bulgaria at a place called Sunny Beach. We relaxed for a while and went for a swim.

When we went back to our car, this is what we found:

We’ve had trouble understanding where is it OK to park. We got parking tickets in Germany and Hungary, but paying them was a whole adventure on its own, so all we did was keep trucking. For obvious reasons, we couldn’t just wave this one off… So we called in and 15 minutes later we were trying to convince two guys that worked at the parking department in Sunny Beach (who didn’t speak anything other then Bulgarian) to take the clamp off. They wanted us to pay the fee of 25USD but after lots of back and forth, talk about Mexico, the Rally, Superman, El Chicharito, and our Cucaracha horn, it was all laughs and smiles:

We continued our drive towards Turkey and stumbled into a bunch of other teams including Rally Team America at the Bulgaria-Turkey border. Jeff and Lex had just been through the entire border crossing process so they walked us through it and probably saved us a bunch of time. Thanks!

Getting our Turkish Visas at the border was a breeze and overall we must’ve stopped for about 30 minutes or so. After the border, the roads turned into real bliss, with amazing pavement and multiple driving lanes. We made it in no time to Istanbul where we got horribly lost since we have no detailed city maps and Istanbul is huge! Before knowing it, we had crossed the Bosphorus and were in Asia! If you have been reading our other posts, you must understand this is an important milestone since chances are 5 teams won’t make it past Europe!

Anyway, after about an hour of driving around, we finally found it: The W Hotel in Istanbul was shinning in all its glory in front of us. After days of sleeping in cheap hotels and camping with Gypsies, we were at one of Istanbul’s finest establishments, all thanks to our good friend Shaker who offered us a place to stay in the top floor of the hotel for free.

Shaker
Shaker is an honorable member of Team Basic Cruising because he was very close of doing the first leg of the rally (Goodwood – Istanbul) with us. Due to unfortunate causes, Shaker wasn’t able to join us but we met with him here and it’s been great seeing him. We feel blessed for the friends we’ve run into during this trip. They have gone completely out of their way to accommodate us and have exceeded what anyone could ever imagine from a hospitality standpoint. Shaker has also been an important donor to our fundraising efforts.

Shaker, there are no words we can use to thank you. You have a very kind heart and are more than a friend to us. Your continued love, friendship, support, and craziness is very dearly to those around you.

Thank you once again, I look forward to seeing you soon brother.
Love,
V