Day 23.2: If you've ever lost every part of yourself If you've left your heart on a lonely avenue It will be only a matter of time Before your life comes through for you

Miles: 256
Countries: turkey
Stops: Ankara -> not even sure where.
Playlists: Keep Holding On by Avril Lavigne followed by both of DJ Bruno's sets to get us going.

It was a quite ride for a while. We were bummed and just had to gtfo out of Ankara. It wasn't even that we received bad news there, there just wasn't anything there. It's a government/embassy/university city and a major transportation hub. I'm sure its arts and culture scene is as good as they claim, but we didn't see it on a Monday afternoon. We, did, however, see plain chaos, at every corner. There was a reason it was never on our initial route, it delivered exactly what was promised.

We drove out asap and just drove staring out the windows. At least the mountains started appearing once we got out of the city and it went from lush to a desert-mountain scene. Super neat! We kept driving southwest towards Bodrum/pamukkale and didn't discuss our plan or what we would possibly do at this point. Just drive.

At one point the highway was down to one lane and we saw a huge car pile up, the car was like an accordion with all its windows shattered. That's kind of when we woke up a little out of our self pity and realized there are worse things. This brought us into a big conversation about the privileged life we have and how no matter how many times we hear it all our lives, it doesn't click until you experience it. Even a 2 hour tour south in the Dominican or Mexico off your resort doesn't quite relay the message until you really experience it on a daily basis.

Not knowing when you'll be able to shower.
Where you will get food.
Not having money and legitimately resorting to begging.
Not knowing who you can trust.
Feeling vulnerable whether it's being sick or just in general lacking control of your life (in our case lack of documents, language, and being completely lost, especially when we were off the grid (which was more fun!) before we needed roaming to be able to reach embassies and such).

These are all things we've already experienced and it has only been 3 weeks. It's been an incredible journey thus far and, if nothing else, eye opening.

So we belted out some inspirational tunes and decided we're going to keep going. Why stop now? We'll do Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and at the very least Kazakhstan. From there, we'll just start showing up at borders until someone lets us in :)