Reilly Traveling Circus

No, it isn’t November. Rather it is the end of day 3 of driving across Turkey. First off, eastern Georgia and western Turkey have high mountains and plains and are simply gorgeous. Basically, ever since Azerbaijan we have been treated to really good roads, spectacular scenery and great weather.

To summarize the past three days: Tbilisi to Erzurum, Turkey; Erzurum to Sivas, Sivas to Ankara. As usual, the border crossing was fairly painful. It took us about 2.5 hours but it was much longer for people behind us in line. You have to question the wisdom of the rally organizers for scheduling one of the longest mileage days on a day with a border crossing. In the end, they had to cancel the planned competitive regularities so that people could make the hotel at a decent hour. The hotel was at 7,000’ elevation and some of the cars had to drive through snow and hail. Fortunately, we weren’t one of them.

As has been true in multiple countries, a lot of police presence in Turkey. It is striking that they are posted at many of the major turns on our route, even pretty obscure back roads. We had an ‘uh oh’ moment when three of them signaled us to stop when we were turning on to a dirt road. It turns out that they wanted to take each other’s picture posing with our car. Of course you can! Big sigh of relief when we pulled away.

We had our best day in the regularities to date. On the first, we hit the second checkpoint within 1 second of the specified time. On the second, we didn’t have a stopwatch running and just went off the speedometer and yet still performed quite well. We haven’t seen the results of the third yet. Drove through a brief rainstorm this afternoon, which had the benefit of getting our windshield pretty clean. The car continues to run well and we have avoided any major navigation mistakes. We are fortunate to be moving further away from the Iran border given the events of the past 24 hours. All in all, a really good run of 5 days. Tomorrow it is off to Istanbul before heading to Bulgaria on Sunday.