When I traveled to Morocco with Travel Talk in 2019, I believe there was a rule that participants were supposed to be between 18 and 39 years old. This wasn’t a strict rule at all. On my Morocco tour, there was a delightful couple my parents’ age who were on a world tour and had just walked the Camino Santiago, and there was a lovely mom with her college-aged daughter. But the rest of the participants fell into this age range, and of the 20 or so of us, I think I was one of the 5 oldest people. I anticipated that being the case again in Turkey, and the first thing I noticed when we walked into the room where we were having our welcome meeting was that the rule had clearly changed without me realizing it. Most of the people we saw at first were older. Significantly older—there were several retired married couples. And the group was big–twice as large as the Morocco tour. And though I was not expecting a party tour (nor would I ever go on a tour that I expected to be a party-tour), it was a different vibe than I had envisioned. Our group ended up being a little over 40 people with ages ranging from 23ish to probably 70s. There were people from the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Belarus, Serbia, China, Africa, and the Middle East, and at first I wondered how everyone would connect across ages and ethnicities. Would people self-segregate by age? Would we find things in common?
And the answer, of course, is that it only took about a day for me to realize that age and background wouldn’t have much impact on the connections we made on the trip. A special thing about travel is that you start to realize that there are ways to connect with most anyone regardless of what you do or don’t have in common at first glance. It’s a self-selecting type of person who chooses to go on a tour like this one, and a shared interest in travel is all any of us needed to bond.
A barrier that was challenging for me to overcome though was my level of Covid caution. As a life-long extreme hypochondriac, the pandemic was my worst-nightmare come to life. I hid in my house and didn’t even go in a grocery store for at least the first 6 months of the pandemic. I did contactless pickups and then left groceries untouched for days in case germs were on the bags. After Covid testing became easily available, I must have done 50 of them. And then vaccines were released and things were looking up… until just a month or two later when my mom got her cancer diagnosis. As the rest of the world gradually started to reemerge from their cocoons, I went further into hiding to keep my mom safe. Since I went with her to appointments, I feared bringing her not only Covid but any potential illness. I got special permission to keep working from home even after my coworkers returned in person. My mom didn’t finish her treatments until the month before my trip, so I left for my journey having spent over two years in near isolation.
Of course I recognized that it wouldn’t be possible to go on this trip and be cautious in the way I’d been for the previous two years. I recognized that it was highly possible, even likely, that I’d get sick at some point on the trip, and I decided it was worth the risk. I didn’t want my dreams and goals to be on indefinite hold without even a guarantee that things would ever be back to what had been “normal.” Still, I’d worn my N-95 mask inside all public places on my trip until this point, and I had miraculously not gotten sick yet. When we started the tour though, I knew that I’d be around our 40 new friends every waking hour of the next 12 days. A mask wasn’t going to keep me from getting sick if everyone else on our bus did. And so, feeling reckless and a bit unhinged, I joined my 40 new friends without a mask and tried to remember how to talk to strangers without my facial expressions hidden. Michael remembered everyone’s name in the first 15 minutes. I’m not exaggerating. I felt tired after meeting about 5 people, and at first, they probably thought I was strange and mute. (They would not have been entirely wrong.) But I pushed through, and it gradually got easier. (Spoiler alert—I did not get sick in Turkey. And I’m still in touch with several of the wonderful new friends we met there. Come visit us in New Orleans, friends!)
With our tour group, we spent another day in Istanbul visiting the must-see attractions. Topkapi Palace was the royal palace where the sultans used to rule, and it looked like something from a fairy tale. The Blue Mosque was under construction, but the scaffolding inside couldn’t entirely hide the beauty of it. The Hagia Sophia was something I’d dreamed of seeing for a decade. Originally built between 532 and 537AD, it was built as the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Constantinople. It was the world’s largest cathedral for a thousand years, and then when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, it was converted to a mosque and became the principle mosque in the city. In 1935, it became a museum, and then in 2020, it was reclassified as a mosque. Today it’s still the most iconic monument in Turkey. I’m endlessly fascinated by sites that have been shared by multiple faiths (even if the “sharing” wasn’t voluntary). Standing in this space, bare feet on thick blue carpet and hair covered in reverence, felt surreal.
That evening, we took a cruise on the Bosphorus to see the cityscape, and the next morning we headed down the coast into a whole new continent.
