Day Three: Almost Smooth

Task for today is to visit Troy. We gather bread, tomatoes, nuts, and fruit on our way to the bus center for Troy. We arrive to find that we are taking a minibus, which is called a "dolmus" in Turkish. We are a bit sketched out, but by the end of the trip we ride these like pros as they are the most common and cheapest form of transportation in Turkey.

After a cramped, smelly, but beautiful hour-long drive into the country we arrive in Troy. It was beautiful!  Red poppies everywhere. Most of the ruins left are Roman, not from the original Trojan city. But it was still too cool to look out over the water and think, this is where they stood to spot any incoming ships, friend or foe. At Troy we meet an avid traveler in his 70's from New York, eager to grace us with his seemingly unending knowledge of Turkish history...Nick. Now he was a talker. 

Nick ends up talking our ears off on the dolmus ride back to Canakkale. When we arrive he walks us down to an old naval museum on the water. It had beautiful views:

Then we catch a ferry across the water to Kilitbahir which is kind of a weird town across the water. Here we decide to try Turkish coffee...it feels like your teeth are rotting. So thick & strong. I love strong coffee but this was like someone ran a pound of espresso into a tiny espresso cup.

The two young men working at the cafe try really hard to talk with us and one claims he was a professional Turkish basketball player. After the disgusting cup of coffee we run back to the ferry in the rain so as not to miss it (it literally pulls out once our feet are on board) and wander around to find dinner. The highlight of dinner comes when our waiter (who had an excellent sense of humor when it came to dealing with our Turkish) pulls out a dust-buster and proceeds to vacuum our tabletop before he brings us our plate of watermelon. Clearly we were unusually messy or he was just trying to be funny.
We hang around until our bus is supposed to leave at 10:30pm for Bodrum. We walk to the bus station and guess what...our bus had broken down and we had to now catch the 12:30am bus to Izmir which will arrive at 6:30am and then we switch to a bus that will arrive in Bodrum at 11am. FANTASTIC. So we hang around and then hop on the bus 2 hours later and we're off...