Thinking Allowed: Fethiye, Tlos, Saklikent (not really :( ) and Kas

The past fortnight has been mellow and smooth - Fethiye has been almost unique in our travels for how easy it is to chill out and enjoy ourselves.

Aurora's joined a Teen Hub, started by an enterprising worldschooling mum who wanted to give her teen daughters more social life. It's much more free-form than what we expected, but sounds like a dozen (somewhat) enthusiastic teenagers can have a pretty good time swimming, cooking, playing games and so on. On an excursion to the Blue Lagoon, they all paddled out with a kayak, SUP, and pedalboats with a slide off the back.

The giant playground is still a big part of our lives. Sophia has transferred her gymnastics verve to chin-ups, and has built some stamina. Heavily tattooed muscle men nod approvingly as she does set after set. The other girls have gotten into it since I started storytelling choose-your-own-adventures for 30 seconds between sets; the other day Sophia did 200 chin-ups in sets of 5, and Tova did 100 chin-ups in sets of 2-3. Some other families showed up and we ended up with eight or nine yelling kids doing chin-ups of varying quality.

We've also made more progress on our outdoor escape rooms; the Rhodes mystery is written up, and some friends who moved on from Fethiye to Rhodes have tested it for us. Fethiye will be our next target, although we'll only have a few days to whip it up. It was pretty fun to learn about the island's history: how Helios created the island as a consolation prize when Zeus divvied up the Greek islands and forgot him, how Suleiman the Magnificent led an army of 100,000 Ottomans and defeated the Knights Hospitaller, whose terms of surrender allowed them to all safely leave for Malta, so there were actually very few deaths on either side; how Chares of Lindos, architect of the Colossus, committed suicide because of the fatal flaws (get it?) in the statue's design. And so on.

Now we're on a three-day road trip southeast. Yesterday we visited Tlos, a 2,000-year old ruined citadel. Overlooking a sprawling valley with snowy mountains to either side, these ruins are the ideal mix of both remarkably well-preserved, but also mostly free to roam around in however one likes. The girls played house in sunken foundations, peeked into crumbling tombs, and we climbed up to the top of the fortress for a fine, windy view. We then went to Saklikent Gorge, a huge attraction in these parts, but unfortunately the boardwalk into the narrow slit canyon was closed for hours due to dangerous rockfall. We had to content ourselves with a pleasant lunch in hammocks and cushions by a brook, and then squeezed into our 5-seater sedan for the last hour to Kas.

Kas (pronounced Cash) has turned out to be much more touristy than Fethiye. Ice creams tripled in price, two-dollar lentil soup turned into nine-dollar falafel, and locals playing backgammon turned into backpackers drinking lattes. At the same time, the wide bay is a gorgeous sparkling blue, with large green islands, white yachts, and one large gray warship manned by some very lucky soldiers. We walked out to a 1st-century amphitheatre overlooking the sea, petted many cats (Tova is infatuated with Whiskers, who often meows on our balcony) and tomorrow Tamar and Aurora will kayak all day to see a city that sank beneath the waves hundreds of years ago.