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Camlik restaurant awaits the wedding guests
photo credit: Sue Barnes |
Please forgive me for having taken time out from the blog to get married and enjoy the company of friends and family who travelled from the UK and from America to be with us on our special day. But now we are man and wife, all our visitors have returned to their homes around the world, we have reclaimed the sadly neglected garden, caught up with the housework and normal life can resume again.
Reading the last few entries on our blog, to remind me where we had abandoned it, I see that the most recent posts were mostly gloom and doom, with us having lost our old cat Horrace, one of our dogs becoming very ill and wedding plans in complete disarray, so picking up where I left off I have to continue in that vein for a little bit longer as I catch up on our lives in Turkey.
At the end of the last post I explained how my friends who were coming from England to help me set up and decorate the restaurant, through no fault of their own and for very valid reasons were not able to come here after all and that we had also been let down by the photographer within the last few days. Within hours of the post being published we were contacted by a friend in the village who together with her husband offered to give up their time to help us with the preparations, and a professional photographer from the UK who was holidaying in Oludeniz offered to take the photographs. We were overwhelmed with their kindness and without them we don't know what we would have done. Thank you so very much.to you all.
On the Friday before the wedding the first guests to arrive were my daughter & partner together with my grand-daughter Rosie. On the previous Monday, our Labrador Tyson's condition deteriorated and he suffered over 20 fits in two days. His blood sugars were low and nothing we did seemed to bring them back to normal. The fact that he could not be left alone meant one of us being with him 24 hours a day which seriously impeded all the jobs we had left to do to prepare for the wedding. We took him back to the vets who confirmed his low blood sugars. We fed him more frequently but this did not seem to make any difference, apart from the fact that he reached saturation point with food and just couldn't eat any more - a strange occurrence for a Labrador who normally eats everything! I went down to Fethiye and bought glucose powder and fed him this mixed with water and also spoonfuls of honey and thankfully by Thursday the fits were slowing down. We were very concerned about our guests arriving the next day as the fits were severe and not a pleasant thing to have to observe.
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A rather bemused Rosie arrives at Dalaman
after her first ever plane trip |
Our visitors duly arrived on Friday and I collected them from the airport in our hire car whilst David stayed with Tyson. While I was waiting at the bottom of the slope at Dalaman airport I thought to myself that I was feeling a bit emotional and was likely to cry when I saw my daughter & family coming down the ramp, especially as it was my grand-daughter's first trip to Turkey at only 6 months old. But I was holding myself together nicely until a lady coming down the ramp asked me if she could borrow my lighter. I asked her if she had just flown in from Stansted to which she replied "yes". I asked her if she had been on the Easy jet flight - "Yes" she replied "Who are you waiting for?" I said "My daughter" she then said "with a baby?" I told her "yes I am" she said she had sat near them on the plane and that the baby was incredibly well behaved and I had the most beautiful grand-daughter. Well that was it - I stood with this complete stranger and blubbed!!! Then my daughter arrived and she cried too. A very emotional but wonderful moment.
Tyson had one more fit that evening and then they finally abated. But he was a poor old thing after the amount of fits he had suffered and it was several more days before he was really OK again, a stability that thankfully continues now.
Later that evening more guests arrived from the UK and on Saturday we had very small stag and hen parties. David went down to the village with a few close friends and relatives and I opted to have a meal at home with the girls, so that my grand-daughter could go to bed. We both thoroughly enjoyed our evenings but my daughter retired fairly early not feeling too well and when I woke up the next morning I too was most unwell. We both spent an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom and thought that we had food poisoning. Sunday and Monday we were both in bed (when not in the bathroom) all day. On Monday evening we had three airport trips to make so David did two with a friend and I managed to get out of bed and do the third. But I was very afraid to leave the confines of the house to go out in public! I don't know how I did that trip but somehow managed it unscathed and without embarrassing myself.
We both still felt so ill on Tuesday that we went to the chemists for some medication. As luck would have it the doctor was outside the pharmacy having lunch with his friends so he gave us a free consultation and prescribed three lots of medication to take.We then heard of other people who had similar symptoms and it appeared to not be food poisoning after all but a virus that was going around.
By now of course the wedding was getting ever closer, as in tomorrow and it was all a bit of a worry. Being on a very tight budget we had opted to make all the arrangements ourselves and now we were way behind schedule. I went down to the restaurant that evening to meet the friends who had agreed to help me with the decorations and was totally overwhelmed to find not just the couple who had offered to help but many other ex-pat villagers arriving to help me also. But this is Turkey and the tables and chairs had not arrived the balloons were late and because of my being ill the arches had not been made. Unable to return the next morning myself, as I had to be at the hairdressers for 10.00 am I can't thank each and every one of them enough for offering to return the next morning to finish the preparations without me, a kindness and sense of camaraderie I can never repay.
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The registrar's table all set ready for the wedding vows
photo credit: Sue Barnes |
In my next post I will write how like phoenix rising from the ashes, and after another major glitch we climbed out of the gloom and doom and had a wedding day that in spite of the many problems in the run up to it and our limited budget, surpassed our wildest dreams, was one of the best days of our lives and one that we will remember forever.
To be continued ...........
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