Go No-Go Gulet This morning it rained cats and dogs here in Gocek. Our motorcycle tour of Turkey has been blessed with great weather so far, which looks to remain great through the next week. Nothing is more important for a happy ride than the weather. We all have several weather apps that we use to forecast weather. My favorite is Dark Sky, which gives a weather coverage radar map that you can move over…
Gator Bob: Tomb Raider What about Bob? To start with, Bob is a very special name amongst AFMC members. Yes, it is a palindrome, meaning it can be read forwards or backwards with equal ease. The name Robert has been around in England and Germany since the Middle Ages and Bob has been used as the hypocorism (shortened “nickname”) as well since then. It seems they were into rhyming names back then, so Rob easily…
Constable Osman Almost Gets a Promotion It was 7:00am on the first Sunday in October and Constable Osman of the Trafik Polisi Turkiye, Güneybatı Bölümü (Southwest District – covering the provinces of Izmir, Aydin and Muğla) woke up with a big headache. October was make or break month for his promotion to Sergeant and he really needed the extra 750 TL per month the promotion would give him since his wife was expecting a new…
The Angel’s Trumpet The best part about traveling with a diverse group of people is all the interesting tidbits of valuable information you gather along the way. Today was no exception even though one is reminded that it’s important to be discerning in what one chooses to believe or not. Mr. Ripley had it right when he collected his curios from around the world. It may not matter sometimes whether it’s true or not, but…
A Night to Remember This was a day for working our way down the Aegean coast of Turkey and enjoying the influence of Greek architecture and culture on these Asian lands. We began with a pleasant outdoor very Turkish breakfast with the lapping waters just a few steps away. The biggest event was the arrival of the replacement “Princess Van”. I do not want to get into describing automotive interiors with all this ancient grist…
Surrendering to the Darkness I usually don’t credit people for giving me titles since I usually snatch unintended catch-phrases out of thin air and feel the person had no idea what they were saying. But this one is different. One of our intrepid motorcycle tour guides, Skip Mascorro, the founder of MotoDiscovery, gets the nod. I will fill in the details of the day in a bit, but as we were getting our final ride…
Hospitality in the Modern World Back in 1975 I was asked to teach hospitality economics to the students at Cornell’s Hotel School, arguably the best school in the world for hotel management. It was not so challenging devising hospitality examples or cases to highlight important economics principles, though getting these abstract concepts into the heads of students fixated on “flush and gush” courses and wine-tasting was a bigger obstacle. The concept of mean reversion and…
The Table Tilts We try to keep politics out of the mix during our motorcycle rides of the last twenty-four years. We tend to fail miserably at that goal since feelings run deep and in opposite directions, just like on the national scene. In the motorcycling world nothing means more than the kind of metal you ride. While there are plenty of subcultures in motorcycling, the big rift is between people who ride Harley Davidsons…
Back in the Bul We arrived yesterday afternoon at the brand new Istanbul Airport. While I first came to Istanbul twenty-five years ago, I feel like I have had a crash course in Turkey in the past two years. When I came here several times between 1994-1998, it was while I was running Global Private Banking for Bankers Trust. We had a number of clients in Istanbul and I would spend most Friday’s and Saturday’s…
Heading to the Center of the Earth When you learn about the anthropological history of mankind (whether through a course or a personalized DNA sample intended to give you some sense of whence you evolved), you quickly learn that the best anthropologists can determine, we all began in East Africa somewhere as part of Lucy’s clan. From there our ancestors headed north across what we now call the Red Sea into the Fertile Crescent of…