Trip to Taos: What to see around Taos

On our trip to Tao for skiing we also took some time to visit historic sites and museums. On the days that we skied, we were done by 4:00 pm and made a point of visiting the town.
One of the afternoons, we visited the Pueblos. This is one of the longest continuously occupied villages in US.

Then we went to Rio Grade Gorge Bridge which is just totally incredible. It was so windy we hardly walked to the middle and ran back to the car. I still cannot imagine how that bridge was built. It is incredibly high...

We enjoyed our nights by trying many different restaurants and visiting cute shops around town.

I forgot to mention that we rented a house in Taos instead of staying at a hotel. It was so much more roomy and comfortable than a hotel room. We burned logs in the fire place, made s'mores, and enjoyed the coziness and comfort of this little home.

The last day of our trip, we headed to Los Alamos where Atomic bomb was invented and tested.  We visited Bradbury Science museum which is a great museum for both adults and kids. It is free and it has very nice exhibits as well as engaging games and puzzles for the kids and adults who want to be kids again... ;-)

From Los Alamos, we headed to Santa Fe for lunch. We had a great Italian lunch before we headed to the airport. What a great trip we had... It was a good balance of skiing and sight seeing. We will definitely be back next year...

Trip to Taos: Beautiful ski days...

At the beginning of the Christmas break we headed to Taos, New Mexico. We have been there few times in the past to ski and we thought it would be good for the kids to improve their ski skills. This time, we decided to fly to Albuquerque which was much better than driving for 12 hours. The drive from Albuquerque to Taos is still another 2.5 hours but that was not too bad compared to 12 hours.
Also the view of the sun set was just gorgeous.

The next day, we headed to the slopes on a beautiful day. Kids spent the day at the ski school, my husband and I hit the slopes, and my mom enjoyed the ski valley.

How cool he is by the way? He got lots of comments on his goggles...

Me and my flower pants...

We love skiing together. It was such a nice day...



Grandma with her stylish hat, having lunch with us...

At the end of the day, we picked the kids up for the last hour and skied together. Sude did pretty good but Korman was still too scared. We decided to keep them in the school one more day since the weather forecast was not promising another sunny day.

The second day was a total blizzard with snow fall and wind. Kids were able to go to ski school since it was at the base but we decided to hang out at the ski valley and just enjoy the fireplace at the restaurant, have a long lunch, hot chocolate, and watch the kids.

The third day the weather cleared up and it was another sunny and beautiful day. We decided to keep Sude with us all day and she did awesome. She's got such great balance and pretty much no fear. She was even able to ski down some blue slopes.

 
We had hot chocolate and got some toe warmers for ourselves...

Had hamburgers for lunch an just hang out. Korman also did great and we got to ski all together at the end of the day.
I think next year, after a day at the ski school, we can ski all together as a family...
How exciting....

Turkey - Road trip day 7 (Cesme and Alacati) - Backwards

I thought I figured out how to upload multiple photos to blogger.

Well, I was wrong... Kind of wrong. I did upload them all but for some reason they did get uploaded backwards. Therefore, this will be a backwards post. We will go from the end of the day to the beginning. It should be interesting...

The day ended with celebration of my boy's birthday. He turned six the last day of our trip. He was happy to get a cake with a treble clef on it. We promised him a bigger part when we are back to US but for now he was a happy camper.

Right before the cake, guess what they drank...
Pickle juice.
Such a reminder of my childhood... With a slice of pickled cucumbers in it...

For dinner we were at Alacati. It is a neighboring town to Cesme and quite famous lately with it's small hotels, famous restaurants and shops, and very cute streets.

This was my dinner; seafood salad. It was absolutely wonderful. Before and after dinner, we walked around, shopped, and just enjoyed the busy streets. We found out that we were way too early for dinner and some of the restaurants did not even start serving dinner. But at the end, we found one and we were very happy with it.

Before we headed for Alacati, we went to the town center of Cesme. There is a pretty big size castle in the center of the town. It has been recently restored. It was very well kept, clean, and organized. I can easily say that it was the best castle tour we did in our trip. The view was just breath taking...

Before we went to the castle we had the famous gum cookies. The cookies contain mastic gum and you can smell it and taste flavor in the cookies. They were just out of the oven. Kids were not crazy about them but I and my husband each enjoyed one.

This is the town center of Cesme, which consists of shops, restaurants and bakeries.

We spent the morning at one of the famous beach clubs at Cesme called Paparazzi. The beach club concept was new to us but it apparently means that you get some seating and umbrella in return of spending around $20 per person during the day. They have small restaurants and serves not only food but also drinks, ice cream, etc. and you just hang out.

I have miserably failed to take picture of what I ate for lunch. It was some sort of sea weed salad with a slice of cheese bread. It was really good but no pictures... But there are pictures of my favorite people swimming in beautiful Mediterranean sea...

Turkey - Road trip day 6 (Efes and Cesme)

The next morning we got up to the crisp coolness of Sirince. We headed for breakfast which consisted of many types of cheeses, olives, jams, tomatoes, cucumbers, fried eggs, and tea. We polished breakfast with a cup of Turkish coffee.

I forgot to mention that we were able to find a nice hat for my husband the night before. He had it on every day for the rest of the trip...

This was my pretty pink cup and delish coffee...

From Sirince, we headed to Ephesus (Efes) which is an ancient Greek (then Roman) city. It is only 20 minutes from Sirince which makes Sirince a great spot to spend the night instead of big hotels in Kusadasi or Izmir.

It was remarkable to see Efes which had 25,000 occupants at one point of time. The weather was hot and we made it easy on ourselves by taking the trip up the hill with a carriage instead of walking. Then the only thing left for us was to walk down to the parking lot.

This is my new hat. I felt like Indiana Jones for the rest of the trip...

From there we headed to House of Virgin Mary. Pilgrims visit the house based on the belief that Virgin Mary was taken to this house by Saint John and lived there until her death. The house is actually a chapel now.

After lunch at Efes we drove to town of Cesme. This is a reasonable size beach town which is famous with it's windy beaches and wind surfing. Every year thousands of people come to this town to enjoy the beaches and do wind surfing.

After a long day of walking and heat, we directly headed to the pool.

Someone was really tired...

We stayed in a nice hotel/beach club. The rooms were "OK", compared to the price and the other places that we stayed not great.

For dinner, we headed to one of the cafes by the sea. This town is famous with a sandwich called "kumru". Kumru means dove and we did not know what kind of food "kumru" was for a while. At the end, we found out that it was a sandwich made with cheese, Turkish sausage, salami, and tomatoes. It is like a grilled cheese sandwich but the cheese does not get pressed and melted within the sandwich. They melt the cheese and put all the ingredients on top of the cheese on the grill, then they place the blob of goodness in a sliced bread. And the bread is not mushy sandwich bread but a mini bread made only for this sandwich and in result only for me. As you can imagine I had one...

And I had a dessert too. They are simply fried dough dipped in heavy, sweet, and yummy syrup.

Kids had ice cream and for some reason wanted to be the Statue of Liberty of Cesme...

Well done...