4Runner Roadtrip – A Race Across Turkey and a Holiday in Greece

With our time in Georgia finishing up and our doctors appointments set in Turkey, we reluctantly left our sea side town. We were quite curious to see the Black Sea from the Turkey coast line. Our plan was to spend a few weeks, maybe more going across the top of Turkey and finishing our loop of the country.

Kobuleti, Georgia

Crossing back into Turkey, Shani had to get out of the 4Runner and cross on foot even though the Georgian guys let her stay in the truck. The Turkish guy was kind of difficult about it but it’s best to just ignore and comply when crossing these borders. When my turn came up we ran into a problem.  My visa for Turkey still had plenty of time but they were only going to issue a transit visa for the 4Runner. This was a clerical error on their part but there wasn’t anything that could be done about it, especially at the border. I tried to get a couple of weeks for the vehicle visa from the customs officer but all the computer would give us was seven days.This little snafu left us in quite the quandary. Shani had spent untold hours setting up the doctors’ appointments and so bailing out on that wasn’t an option. We did some quick Googling and keeping the vehicle in Turkey past the visa limit didn’t seem like a great idea. It looked like we could by paying a daily fine but then it might get impounded and who knows what else could happen. Stories on the internet were varied but we were not the first travelers to have this issue.

Erroring on the side of caution, we decided on some long days of road tripping after we finished up with our appointments. Shani had also spent many hours finding and booking a dog friendly apartment in Trabazon so that we each could get our checkups but clearly that was going to have to change too. So basically we were going to have 3 days to go about 1,000 miles across Turkey. 

On the plus side, the medical center was top notch and we both got to see a lot of specialists in one day. Shani had a pretty rough day though; she was trying to get our international insurance to cover it and spent 8 hours trying to get all of the authorizations and tests done (fasting the whole time). Learning from this, I opted for the pay out of pocket option and could not have been happier. We both had a personal liaison (Anya was her name) guiding us from one specialist and test to another and in my case everything went very smoothly. I would certainly recommend it. Anya even arranged for her husband to drive us back and forth from the apartment to the hospital complex. If you are interested you can learn more about the Medicalpark here.

Google says it’s about 19 hours of driving to get from Trabazon to Alexandroupoli, just over the border in Greece. For us, that means at least 22 hours. And so we set off on a Friday morning for a lovely drive along the Black Sea, through towns we didn’t have time to investigate and places we weren’t going to get to stay. We were a bit salty about the whole vehicle visa thing, to be sure. Near Samsun we turned inland for a bit and ended our day at the Khara Otel, probably the nicest place we stayed in Turkey! Definitely a five star place.

The next two days are kind of a blur of packing the car, driving and unpacking the car. We ended up in Gelibolu on the last Sunday of the high season. The place was packed but we got lucky and found a parking spot close to the hotel. The town was lovely and we had a nice stroll and took in some of the war and memorial monuments located on the water.

It certainly would have been nice to spend a couple of days relaxing on the water in Gelibolu but time was not on our side. We needed to get the 4runner out of Turkey and so we set off for Greece. It was just shy of 2 hours from Gelibolu to Alexandroupoli so easy peasy, right?

I never like to do a border crossing on a weekend but we figured a Monday shouldn’t be too bad (not that we had any choice). There weren’t hoards of big rigs waiting on the side of the road and generally our approach seemed nearly lifeless. That all changed about a mile before the crossing. Suddenly we were stopped.

And then it was a very, very slow stop and go until we got to the Turkish border guards. Literally hours. It seems like waiting until the very last of the busy season was a really bad idea on our part. After about 4 hours we were stamped out but then we got tagged for a vehicle X-ray. Oh joy. We spent about another hour figuring out how to get to X-ray and then getting X-rayed in the border no-mans land. It was also shift change time for the X-ray guys so there was a bit more waiting around but at the end of the day they were super nice and didn’t make us take absolutely everything out of the car (like emptying our sliding drawers and fridge); just most of the things!

After X-ray we thought we were going to have to get back into the slow line but there was a super helpful French lady that told us we got to skip the line leaving Turkey and go through a special checkpoint into the no man’s land between Turkey and Greece. So even with the x-rays we actually we were a bit ahead of where we would have been. Things seemed to be looking up; we were actually moving toward the Greek border checkpoint and then we weren’t. It was like everything just stopped, like no one was working at the checkpoint. And so we all just sat there and waited. And waited. Finally something happened and we started moving. By the time we got to the border guard he barely looked at our passports, didn’t bother with any car paperwork and ignored the dog. 7 hours and 20 minutes to cross from Turkey into Greece. What an ordeal.

After our race across Turkey and disaster of a border crossing we were ready for some R-n-R. We stayed two nights in Alexandroupoli where I inadvertently parked in the motorcycle only street parking and got a $30 parking ticket. Our bad luck hangover from Turkey just kept on giving! To get out from under our bad mojo we took a ferry to the Greek island of Thasos and rented a place near Golden Beach and did a lot of resting and relaxing. Our major excursion was a drive around the island and a trip to a jewelry manufacturer to replace Shani’s lost wedding ring.

Stay tuned as we relax in Greece, go back to Bansko, zip through Serbia and spend a bit more time in Croatia before road tripping to France to check in on Peppa and then dropping the 4Runner off in Rotterdam for her ship across the ocean to South America.