Day 151: Saturday 16 August – By The Beach At Camping Akçakil, by Ken

Our itinerary for at least the next week was going to be quite hectic. We decided to make the most of our last planned stop by a beach until we got to Croatia by just chilling out.

Sunrise Seen From Mabel

I spent the morning blogging while Jane re-stitched all the seams on her recently acquired Turkish trousers that turned out not to have been well made!

Just before lunch we bobbed out to a swimming platform off the beach. The water was the warmest I’ve ever swum in, rather like a tepid bath. I stretched out on the platform for a while before getting back in the water and bobbing about by the platform. Then we bobbed back to the beach.

Lunch was Jane’s egg in a bowl which is really good comfort food. As we were eating a buzzer started sounding somewhere inside Mabel. I tracked the buzzing down to the power supply unit and on checking the electrical control panel there was a warning that the leisure battery was low. Not having any mains power I had used the inverter yesterday evening to charge my laptop and forgotten to turn it off. The solar panel seemed to be delivering enough to remedy the problem and we left the sun and the panel to weave their magic.

We received a very helpful email from Laurence’s father who lives on an island about an hour from Istanbul. He gave us some useful tips for Istanbul and was hoping to catch up with us when we get there.

I continued blogging during the afternoon but stopped when my laptop battery got low, not wanting to risk the inverter draining the battery again.

We noticed the two couples that had musical accompaniment to their meal last night were in the restaurant again. They began eating about 13:00, were still there when we ate in the restaurant early evening (Salad and cold aubergine salad with yoghurt to start with chicken schnitzels as mains).

After dinner Jane and I went for a night bob in the sea, it was quite magical being out there in the dark in the wonderfully warm sea.

Back at Mabel we could see the two couples in the restaurant were still eating. They were joined by the same musician and singer as last night. As last night the men in the group loined in the singing, later the women also sung and then got up and danced to the music. It was quite magical end to our stay on the south coast. The singing and dancing was still going strong at 23:00 when I called it a night and went into Mabel to sleep. Jane decided to sleep outdoors again and stayed there all night.