Wanderlust Wednesday: Israel and Turkey

We are so excited about this trip, as both countries are places we have been wanting to visit for some time. The time we traveled internationally was back in 2010 when we backpacked around Europe for six week and it was an amazing experience. Since that time we’ve been a little bit busy moving to South Carolina…then Colorado…then to Tahoe, so there hasn’t been much time for a major trip! And although we travel quite frequently here in the US, both Cam and I have been itching to take a vacation beyond just a long weekend and we were both eager to get out and see a new part of the world. Another motivating factor for planning this trip is that we have four weddings to go to next summer that are all out of state, so traveling overseas in 2013 is probably out of the question. We have been talking about this trip for a long time now, and finally last month we just decided to go ahead and book our tickets!  We are going to be taking two weeks off of work in starting in mid-November, and we’ll get back right after Thanksgiving.

As of now, we’ll be spending the first few days of our trip in Istanbul, Turkey and then we fly from Istanbul to Tel Aviv, Israel. We’ll be spending the majority of our trip in Israel, and there are a lot of different things we want to see when we’re there. However, beyond booking our plane tickets, we really have not booked anything else for this trip yet! (Eeeek…)

Istanbul {via}

Tel Aviv {via}

Sea of Galilee {via}

If you have been to either Israel or Istanbul and you have recommendations about where to go/things to do/places to stay/places to eat I would absolutely LOVE to hear them! Feel free to leave a comment on this post or you can also email me at [email protected] because we’d really appreciate any suggestions. We’re basically going to be spending the next month trying to plan out a more concrete intinerary of what we want to see/where we want to stay/etc, so I’m excited to hear any advice that you might have for us. Also, my sister studied abroad in Jerusalem in 2010 and has been to Israel three times, so she’s helping us with our plans there, and I’ve noticed that a fair amount of bloggers seem to have traveled to Istanbul, so I’ve been trying to check out their posts about it as well. However, it’s definitely a major trip to countries that Cam and I personally are very unfamiliar with so if you have any suggestion of things we can’t miss while we’re there, please send them my way!
 

Dead Sea {via}

Istanbul {via}

Jerusalem {via}