Still raining the clouds are down on the road. Narrow roads lots of trucks, tunnels and mountains. We drove along the most beautiful river with lots of fish farms. We finally had to stop for lunch. In the middle of nowhere!! We found a small restaurant. Surprise the menu was in English. The young man who waited on us spoke some English but! Everything we wanted to order was not available. So ham and eggs. They were delicious. There were no women in this restaurant only men and they looked at us like we were from mars. We needed to use the bathroom, so we asked where, around back? So we headed around back. What’s this? French style! Well you have to get use to these things. Back on the road, passing in town? Against the law especially in front of a policeman. Who would do such a thing? You guessed it! Well the policeman only spoke a bit of English so he let us off. Happy day!! Soon we reached the Bulgarian border. The attendant was all business and no way was she about to buy the story of a mistake on the insurance papers. We were able to purchase a 24 hour insurance transit card and were on our way. The road soon gave away to rolling hills, farms and animals. Cows, sheep, goats, donkeys, geese and dogs all about to cross the road. Going through the villages it was apparent that fall was upon us. The corn stalks are dry and cut in the fields, and many very tall hay stacks. Many homes have corn, paprika’s, pumpkins and squash stacked and spread to dry. What a sight, with the men and women sitting out watching over their harvest. It looks like Halloween is just around the corner. Well 3 hours later and it is warming up. It gets warmer and warmer. The sun is out and hot, but wait it was just fall a few miles back. That’s right as we approached the Turkey border it was back to summer. It was 86 degrees when we reached the border and getting dark as we had lost an hour. The border was more red tape. We had to get a visa and they wanted American dollars. Oh the bank is closed. Finally they decided they could take Turkish lira. 60,000,000. would do so we went to the cash machine and got the money. Then we need immigration stamps, 14,000,000 more liras. But they never checked the insurance papers. Halleluiah!!! There is a large mosque at the border and the full moon was just coming up what a sight to welcome us to Turkey. Now to find a campground. The book says 9km east on D-100. Well we drove and drove off into the countryside and no camp ground. We finally stopped at a small gas station not even sure it was open. There were 3 men sitting in what looked like a kitchen. They were very surprised to see us, Joel explained we were lost and guess what? One of them spoke English. Sadam a young man in his twenties. We explained where we needed to be and he told us we were not even close. However we could stay there and plug in our frig and use the bathroom. They had a small restaurant and we had a nice dinner of grilled chicken and goat patties with a great tomato salad that Sadam made especially for us. So we stayed there with the truckers coming in all night. It was warm and there were lots of mosquitoes. But all in all it was a great day!!
