Gwen thanking Ayden and Taṣ; Patience and Fortitude… Gary looking on.

Actually Patience and Fortitude are the marble male African lions outside the New York Public Library.

“What these radiate is calm and strength, majesty, tranquility, all really good things to be sending as signals at a library.” http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/in-honor-of-a-century-of-patience-and-fortitude/   Pretty good description of what it takes to lead a group of independent cruisers anywhere.

Ayden was more than the bus driver.  He made everything more fun with his interest and attentiveness.

He never said no and always had a smile.  

I hadn’t noticed Taṣ’ gray hair the first day of the trip; but this photo taken in Yὄrὒk Kὄyὒ shows a sprinkle of them.   He internalized his stress and kept a smile on his face.  Here he is tasting a raw almond, or something, because none of us would and someone had to. 

Mark, Dorothy, Patricia and Dave listening to Gwen’s speech.

Strawberries, kiwis, and cake: Oh My!  Celebrating the end of a very fun journey.

A Turkish students from Izmir, (I think he said Izmir and not Istanbul) wanted his photo taken with us. 

You can see that cruisers are definitely not “teetotalers. 

Our blue caps that Ayden was going to deliver to a collection point.

During the trip I was the “keeper of the caps” and people were always handing them to me so I had them in every pocket of my backpack during each day. Each night I would fish them all out to put in a plastic bag for safekeeping.

One final story.

I don’t have a photo of Tazeena’s ceramic pots.  (Had I known how the story was going to play out I would surely have taken one.)    Tazeena really wanted some ceramic pots.  So after passing up one chance to buy some, finally did at a gift shop next to our lunch stop outside Yὄrὒk Kὄyὒ.  While we all had been eating, Tazeena, with Taṣ’ help, had negotiated for two!  But how to get them home on the plane? These were not “fit in your hand pots, but you need two hands to hold them pots.  One went into David’s suitcase packed with dirty laundry.  The other went into Tazeena’s backpack.  David’s luggage went through the checked-baggage scanner, no problem.  But Tazeena’s backpack set off the alarm.  Problem is the checkers believed the alarm was set off by the pack following Tazeena’s which was Patricia’s.  So while Tazeena was walking merrily on her way, Patricia was having to totally unpack her backpack protesting the entire time that there was no pot in her pack.  And, indeed, there was no pot in her pack and the guards made no effort to find the real pack with the pot.

The flight was smooth and shorter than our 2 hour drive back from Bodrum Airport to Marmaris.  But it was sunny and nice and while everyone was happy to be home, I think we were all sorry to have left the Black Sea.