At 6AM on Friday morning I left Istanbul with the intention of making my way to Selcuk, in the South Aegean region. It is now 6AM on Saturday morning, and I have bypassed Selcuk entirely and have instead landed in Fethiye, a town on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. You might be asking, why the change of plans? Why the hell did I go six hours beyond my intended destination? Ugh...I wish that I had a crazy tale to tell, but the truth is that I had some bad luck with the public transit system in Istanbul, and missed the 7AM ferry from Istanbul to Bandirma by less than three minutes. This in itself wouldn't be terribly consequential, except that it meant that instead of catching the 9:45AM train from Bandirma to Izmir, I wound up hanging around Bandirma, an depressingly non-descript town, until 4PM, waiting for the afternoon train. Once again, you might think that this wouldn't be such a problem, EXCEPT that the afternoon train from Bandirma arrives in Izmir at 9:31PM at night, while the last train and bus to Selcuk leave Izmir at 9:29PM. Are you following where this story is going? Sigh...clearly this was not my day for getting anywhere quickly. When faced with the options of either squatting at the Izmir otogar (bus station) overnight and catching an early morning bus to Selcuk, or catching a midnight bus to Fethiye, my next intended destination, I opted for the latter. My dear reaers, I tell you now, it has been a very long twenty-four hours of slow travel. That being said, it wasn't a terrible way to spend a day; I enjoy long travel days every now and again (at least when I have the luxury of time), mostly because they tend to be good days for doing lots of reading, journaling, thinking and revisiting some of the hidden gems on my iPod (Mats Kearney, old stuff by U2, and Nick Drake have been in heavy rotation lately). I'm a little bummed that I skipped Selcuk, as I was going there specifically to visit the ruins of Ephesus, Turkey's answer to Petra in Jordan; however, I'm happy to be in Fethiye (from the short glimpses I've had of it, it's a pretty sweet town), and feel like I've shaved a couple of days off of my original Turkey travel plan, and have a little more wiggle room for getting through the next ten days or so. In any case, I am now sitting in the lobby area of my hostel, hoping that the next hour will go by relatively quickly so I can check in and go get a few hours of sleep. I have some more stories to relate about my time in Istanbul, but they'll be better told once I've showered, brushed and flossed my teeth, slept a little and had a hot meal, all things tha I haven't done in twenty-four hours.