We woke up to a grey sky and knew there was no chance of the air balloon or ATV tour happening, so we had a lazy breakfast before heading out in the rain. The weather was miserable and no less than a kilometre walk we decided we were better off hiring a car and exploring further than getting soaked to look at nothing.
We shopped around for a rental, but finally saw our hostel was the cheapest for 100TL a day, so they helped us organise a Ford focus and we were on our way. There wasn't much to see driving out of Goreme. Sure, there were amazing views at certain parts but the wind and chill made it hard to enjoy. So we kept going til we reached Urgup, to find it was a huge town with shopping malls and fancy clothing stores - none of which we were interested in - so literally did a drive by and hit the next town called Mustafapasa. It was a tiny town, with nothing much so did a drive by again and headed to the Damsa Dam a bit further down south. The dam was huge and we think would have been lovely in the summer, but we stayed for around 30-40 minutes eating snacks in the car while looking out at the dam, because the wind outside was simply too much to bear. Of course Ryan needed to pee so he had a great time taunting me with his pee whipping about in the wind yelling "look at it fly!!". Afterwards we drove back to Mustafapasa for lunch at what I can only say was the weirdest cafe/nightclub? There were no customers and it was quiet, but after we sat down they BLASTED this dance music. Ryan and I were baffled, and also amused because they must have thought that's what us foreigners like. So when we ordered we asked if they could turn the volume down and they looked surprised, and suddenly the music went from dance to Adele - they must have thought we wanted romantic music! Haha. Anyway we asked them later and turns out its a nightclub, but I'm not really sure who would go as it's a tiny town.
Next we drove up North hoping to find something interesting to look at but no luck - other than looking at the Red River - so drove to another town called Avanos which was even bigger than Urgup as it had a university and McDonald's. The area is also known for it's vineyards and pottery making, but we kind of did a quick walk around only because we couldn't read any of the parking signs and weren't sure if we'd parked somewhere illegally.
We felt pretty defeated by that time, considering we'd been driving for 4 hours and hadn't found anything decent to do, so we called it a day and returned home.
That night I got a noodle fix at one of the Korean restaurants in town, and Ryan had the traditional clay pot meat, and then we watched GOT before we went to bed early in preparation for the hot air balloon ride the next morning.
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