Some days on a long trip aren’t about miles or mountains or mosques. They’re about sleep, silence, and letting the body catch up with everything it’s been through. Today was one of those days — and it also marked something bigger: the turning point of the entire journey. From Istanbul onward, every kilometer I ride is a kilometer back toward home.
A Day Built for Doing Nothing
I gave myself a full rest day in Istanbul, and I leaned into it harder than I had anywhere else on this trip. The hotel I’d found was genuinely excellent — the kind of place where you sink into the mattress and realize just how many hours you’ve spent hunched over handlebars over the past two weeks. I treated myself to a bit more comfort than usual, and for once I didn’t feel guilty about it.
Istanbul had always been the declared goal of this trip, the city I pointed the front wheel toward from day one without ever quite believing I’d actually get here. Lying in that hotel room, it hit me properly: I genuinely never thought, when I set off, that I’d make it all the way to Istanbul. I hadn’t even let myself think that far ahead. And yet here I was, on the far edge of Europe, with Asia visible across the water. It’s hard to describe how that feels — somewhere between disbelief and quiet pride. Unbelievably beautiful is the closest I can get.
And with that milestone reached, something shifts. I’m still enormously far from home. But the direction of travel has changed. From here, every day is a day heading back.
Changing the Plan: Why I’m Not Circling the Coast
The original plan had been more ambitious: cross to the other side of the Bosphorus from Istanbul, then ride south along the Turkish coastline before looping back around. It would have added a beautiful, slower chapter to the trip. But plans on a long solo ride are only ever as good as the time you have left, and mine had shrunk. Two lost days fixing the bike in Bucharest, plus this rest day in Istanbul, had eaten into my buffer — and the ferry from Greece to Italy is booked and fixed. No flexibility there at all.
So I made the call: skip the coastal loop, and ride directly from Istanbul toward Greece instead. Not the route I’d dreamed of, but the right one for where the clock stands. Adventure touring is as much about adapting plans on the fly as it is about the riding itself, and this was one of those moments.
Out of Istanbul, Onto the Steppe
I loaded the bike up at a Shell station on the edge of the city — full panniers, dry bag, helmet strapped to the tail, the whole rig ready for a long day. From there I picked up the motorway out of Istanbul, and within a few kilometers it turned into a proper highway: wide, fast, and running dead straight through a steppe-like landscape that stretched out flat and golden on both sides, fields rolling away toward a pale horizon.
Somewhere along that stretch, something genuinely strange appeared next to the road: a full-sized, retired jumbo jet, parked and repurposed as a roadside attraction, its fuselage weathered and its old “AIRLINES” livery faded but still readable. I had to stop for that one. You don’t ride past a decommissioned airliner sitting in a field without pulling over for photos — the scale of the thing next to the bike was almost comical, and it made for one of the more surreal stops of the whole trip.
The Border: Faster Than Feared, But With a Catch
Eventually the imposing gateway of the Turkish–Greek border came into view — a huge, deliberately grand structure marking İpsala Gümrük Kapısı, flags snapping in the wind above rows of arched lanes. Given how long the entry into Turkey had taken weeks earlier, I braced myself for another lengthy wait. But the exit turned out to be refreshingly uncomplicated — the bike’s data was already in the system from entry, so it came down to little more than a quick passport check.
There was one twist I hadn’t planned for, though. Some motorways in Turkey are toll roads, and I’d never found any clear way to pay for them in advance — possibly there’s a website somewhere, but I never tracked one down. It turned out not to matter. Turkish toll roads work through automatic license-plate recognition: every time you use a tolled stretch, the charge is logged against your plate and quietly accumulates. Only at the exit border does it resurface — the officer can see your outstanding toll balance directly in the system, and you have to settle it on the spot, card or cash, before you’re allowed to leave the country. It sounds like it could be a bureaucratic nightmare, but for me it was handled fast and without any fuss at all.
Crossing Into Greece: A Rougher Welcome
The Greek side of the border told a different story straight away. The crossing area was strikingly dirty — litter scattered everywhere despite signs clearly asking people not to leave it, and the road surface right at the crossing was in noticeably poor condition, a rough contrast to the polished Turkish gateway I’d just ridden through.
Rolling into Greece proper brought its own small annoyance: toll booths, immediately and repeatedly, each one demanding a card payment. Every stop meant the same little routine — pull over, peel off the riding gloves, dig the card out, pay, gloves back on, then merge back into traffic. It’s a minor thing, but after the fourth or fifth booth it starts to grate. I still haven’t found a better system for it — for now it’s just part of the toll on this route, in more ways than one.
Alexandroupoli: An Expensive Room and a White Night
I pushed on to Alexandroupoli and found a place to stay for the night. It was, frankly, a surprise — a room with barely more than a slit for a window, letting in almost no light, no breakfast included, and yet it cost more than a genuine luxury hotel had back in Turkey. Not the value-for-money I’d gotten used to on this trip.
The town more than made up for it in the evening, though. It turned out I’d arrived in the middle of a “White Night” street festival — a huge open-air party spilling through the streets. I wandered in, found somewhere to eat, and the food was every bit as good as Greece’s reputation promises: excellent, generous, and remarkably cheap, exactly the combination people always talk about when they describe eating out in Greece. I let myself enjoy it properly — a really good meal, a couple of cocktails, a bit of the festival atmosphere — and then called it a night early, so I’d be fit and ready for whatever the road brings tomorrow.
Looking Back at Istanbul, Looking Ahead to the Road Home
This was a day of contrasts: total rest followed by hours of open highway, an easy border crossing paired with an unexpectedly complicated toll system, a disappointing room balanced by a genuinely great night out. But underneath all of that sits the one thing that actually matters about Day 15 — the trip has quietly flipped direction. Istanbul is behind me now. Everything from here points toward home, however far away that still is. And having actually made it to the city I once doubted I’d ever reach, that return journey starts with a very different feeling than the outbound one did.