Homeward bound from Türkiye
Kalkan day 9

Today was our last day in Türkiye, we had our breakfast at the hotel headed back to the room to pack. At 10:20 I headed down to the reception as the rental car was being picked up at 10:30. When 10:35 arrived I spoke to Tania to see if the rental company were usually on time and she said that she'd call them for me. It turns out that they had forgotten and said they would come straight way.

When they arrived they gave a super-quick glance at the car and said "all good", which was good. I wasn't expecting any issues, but previous experience with car rental firms has taught me to be weary.

Transfer

The transfer arrived on time at 11:45, this time we had to share with 3 other couples and stop off at another hotel to pick-up one of the couples. There was no issue with this it was a mini-bus and not a huge coach. It didn't take long and there was no hold up.

Dalaman Airport

When we entered Dalaman Airport we immediately had to have our bags scanned, there was littel queue for this and as they don't yet have the new scanners we had to empty our bags of electronic items and liquids.

Once through this we needed to check-in our bags, there was a little queue for this about 4 groups in front of us. Theyt printed out our boarding passes, which was good as the TUI App would not let us check in again and when I looked at seats there wa only 1 available. Plus this time we were sat next to each other.

Once checked in we had to go through passport control and here there was no wait and we went straight through to an empty control desk.

Then, we had to have our bags checked again, this time there was a queue and we had to wait about 20 minutes to get through.

Once all the security checks we complete, Susan did some duty-free shopping and then we had some Asian street food. Susan sat while I went to fill up our water bottles, it was near gate 40. On the way I saw a Fire Engine near the Ryan Air plane. When I got to the water fountain there was a cleaner mopping up water. This made complete sense when I filled up the bottles as the water pressure was way too high and the bottles filled up in seconds and overflowed everywhere.

After some emergency ice creams, we walked round to our gate. There was a huge queue, so we just sat down and waited, we could see that the people queuing were having their bags checked and swabbed.

We could see the runway from where we were sat and I noticed 3 F-16C fighter jets on the runway waiting to take off.

When we finally went through the gate we weren't checked and just went straight through. The flight was all good, we flew over Turunç, where Susan and I went on our first holiday together in 2008, we then flew over Greece, Croatia, Italy, Switzerland, France and then East Sussex. In East Sussex, we made 4 loops before we were allowed to approach Gatwick, we flew over my friends house in Muddles Green.

Home

Once we landed and collected our bags, we went to Marks & Spencer to get some food to cook when we got home and then headed to the Hoppa shuttle bus back to the hotel to collect the car.

The drive was all good and little traffic, the only issue we had was when we got to the Dartford Tunnel the traffic lights turned red so that 6 oil trucks could be escorted through the left-hand tunnel and we had to wait for 7 minutes. In future I shall make sure that I'm in the correct lane for the right-hand tunnel so this doesn't happen again.