Sofia, Bulgaria

We finished our Türkiye leg of the trip today. We spent 21 days here, although for some reason it felt longer. Maybe it’s because we had some sightseeing on most transit days? While we still would like to come back to Türkiye to see the southeast at some point in the future, we both felt like we were ready to move on for this trip. Türkiye has a lot of cool things to see, and a lot of variety. Some of the highlights for me were places I had not heard of prior to the trip - Sagalassos Ancient City, the Whirling Dervishes in Konya, Ani ruins, the Kaçkar mountains, and hiking in the Rose Valley in Cappadocia.

We had a quick breakfast in our hotel room in Trabzon with the bread, cheese, tangerines and ayran (yoghurt drink) we had bought yesterday.

It was pretty quick to then check out from the Hilton, load up the car one last time, and drive seven minutes to the airport. We had filled up the tank last night, so didn’t need to bother with gas stations this morning.

We didn’t see any signs for the car rental return (at least not in English) so drove up to the domestic departures and asked someone. It was just down a level near the Otopark.

The Avis guy went through his checklist and then we lugged our suitcases back up to the departures level.

I had looked into shipping the carry-on suitcase back to Toronto, filled with our cold weather clothes, but it’s pretty pricy. Most our flights allow either two checked bags per person or a carry-on, so we’ll just haul it all the way home. We’re the opposite of folks who travel with just carry-on lol.

Checked in for our flight and then settled in for the wait (our flight was at 11am). I caught up in my blog (flights are good for this).

It was just over two hours to fly to Istanbul (IST). We got served a heated sandwich which was actually pretty good.

At IST, we followed the signs for International Transfer, got an exit stamp from Türkiye, and then we were airside in International Departures! Didn’t have to go through security or lineups anywhere, which was cool.

My Mastercard is just a cash-back card, and when I signed up for it there weren’t any other benefits. On a whim I googled it to see if I had any new travel benefits. According to the AI search results, my card now gives me access to fourteen airport lounges per year!

I was still doubtful, but we figured we’d check it out, as we had six hours to kill. The iGA lounge was at the opposite end of the IST terminal, which took us about ten minutes to walk. There was quite the lineup to enter, but the check-in process was really efficient and the line moved quickly. The long lineup had us wondering just how crowded it would be inside. Oh well, we had gone this far.

Turns out the iGA lounge is ginormous. Most folks crowd into the closest areas to the entrance; we walked through to the mezzanine area overlooking the terminal below. It was quite the relaxing place to eat and while away the time. My credit card pass had a limit of three hours (you have to scan your boarding pass to both enter and exit), so we left before any potential extra charges kicked in.

The Istanbul Airport Museum is right beside the iGA lounge. Many of the museums we had visited throughout Türkiye had empty displays with a sign “On loan to Istanbul Airport Museum”. We had also seen ads for the museum on previous transfers through IST, and had talked about visiting it. So we bought our ticket and entered.

The museum is well done, with artefacts from around the country. Each also has a plug for Turkish Airlines, with a little graphic showing how long it would take to fly there. We spent about 90 minutes going through.

Between the museum and the lounge access I didn’t know I had, the six hour layover turned out to be rather pleasant.

We went down to our gate and waited to board. The flight was full, but I managed to get some space in the overhead bin for our carry-on.

Eighty minutes later we were in Sofia. Bulgaria is part of Schengen and has the new biometric entry requirements for non-EU folks. We had been seated near the front of the plane and the first through immigration so didn’t have a wait.

We had booked airport pickup cause we arrived at night (8pm). It was a short 20 minute drive to our hotel, the DOT Sofia. The check-in was fully online (they don’t have a front desk). I had earlier got our digital keys via the Goki app. I haven’t used it before; it’s quite good.

We have three full days in Sofia. We added Sofia (and Belgrade) to our itinerary after we swapped out the southeast leg of Türkiye, so we’ll have to start tomorrow by figuring out what to do and see here :)