One of our goals in our nomadic lifestyle is to avoid bad weather. We work at planning our travels so we can avoid wearing long pants, or even worse…. Socks!!! I enjoy living in shorts, T shirts and sandals most of the year. We also enjoy looking at the weather back in Seattle once in a while and feeling justified that we are doing the right thing. We are heading back home for a couple of weeks and we were looking at a possible rainy April forecast and wondering why we bought airplane tickets just so I could wear socks for 2 weeks with friends and family. Then we looked at the forecast for our week in Fethiye, Turkiye. It looked wetter, and just as cool. Yikes!!! That’s not what we were expecting when we booked 2 weeks on the Mediterranean to finish off our Asia trip. We ended up with some very wet weather for our first couple of days in Fethiye. We ended up not doing much except some short city walks during sunbreaks, and a lot of future travel planning. We went to the office supply store and got some big sheets of paper and post it notes so we could do some brainstorming.
But the weather had some sun breaks. We were able to find some time to see the town of Fethiye. It has a great long pathway for pedestrians and bikes along the water that went for miles. It has some excellent parks that were used by the Turkish people and tourists trying to get their first taste of Spring in 2025. We also walked up in the hills to see some ancient burial tombs that may have been dug in the 3rd century BC.
On the sunniest and warmest day we took a “Dolmas” bus to the nearby beach town of Oludeniz. It is famous for it’s paragliding. There is a gondola to the top of the nearby mountain where the paragliders can fly all the way down to the beach. It is an amazing view for the paragliders but was also pretty amazing just from beach. The water was a gorgeous turquoise color and we wished the weather was a bit warmer so we could do some swimming. It was sunny but it just wasn’t summer weather yet. It was really fun just to watch the paragliders land right next to everyone on the beach and right down the main street of Oludeniz. They didn’t seem to need much room to land.
We really liked the town of Fethiye and I can see us returning for a longer visit. Many of our nomad friends also like it and have returned here multiple times. We walked along the waterfront several times and enjoyed just hanging out in the old town pedestrian zone. It wasn’t as cute as the Antalya downtown but it was still a very comfortable place to hang out. Lots of restaurants and bars that were very affordable and popular with locals as well as tourists. We also like our Airbnb that was right in the middle of the pedestrian zone. We met our friends Georganna and Tom for a lunch one day. We have also met them in Colombia and Seattle so we joked that we have now met them in 3 different continents and need to see them in Europe next. Fethiye is a great place to meet our friends and many of our nomad friends will be here during warmer weather. I can see us coming back but there are many other cities in Turkiye that are now on our bucket list. The country is going through some huge political problems but it is not visible in the tourist towns we visited.
We are now flying home to Seattle for Easter. We are happy to see everyone but not super excited about the long flights through Amsterdam just to be back in Turkiye in 2 weeks. We are anxious to see some “new countries to us” in Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania during our Eastern European travels from April to June.