Most of our time was spent driving from Ankara to Cappadocia. We broke up the ride with a stop in the Hittite capital. We know a lot about the Hittites because we can read their cruciform tablets. They wrote contracts for everything up to and including marriage – effectively a prenup. Hittites also “invented” loaning money and charging interest. One thing we don’t know about the Hittites is what they did with their dead. We haven’t found any burial grounds, or descriptions of death ceremonies. The Hittites built with stone footers and mud brick walls. The mud brick is long gone. If I included a lot of pictures, you would see a lot of stones in dirt, which isn’t very interesting. We saw three city gates. Here’s a pic of the tunnel gate, which is kind of cool.

Cappadocia is a valley surrounded by four volcanos. Over the millennia, they blew their tops, creating layers of magma and pith (volcanic ash). The pith is soft. For 3,000 years, people dug their houses out of the pith. This continued into the 1950s, when the government moved people to more traditional above ground houses. The mixture of magma and pith also created many interesting formations.

This is a popular area for hot air balloon rides. Our tour did not include a balloon ride, but they reserved spots for those of us who were interested. We didn’t know about this until after the tour started, but it didn’t take long for us to decide we were interested. We got up at 4 AM and brought our credit card. It turns out Road Scholar reserved spots with a specific pilot. Some pilots go up, then down and that’s it. Ours went up, swooped (swooped slowly, nothing in a hot air balloon happens quickly) back down to the ground, got close to interesting formations, slowly rotated the balloon so everybody could get good pictures, and in general proved himself precision pilot for sure. It was quite entertaining and we had a wonderful ride.

If you want to see some balloon pics, visit the blog.