Good morning. This is Doug with Team AroundTheWorld1999 with today's journal entry for November 24, covering our journey from Erzerum to Zara. Both cities are located in the beautiful country of Turkey.

Today is a sad turning point for the team. Calgary Jones (Earle) is flying to Athens to meet his lovely girlfriend Christie and they will embark on a romantic getaway to various European cities. We all knew about their plans for a rendezvous but originally they were to meet in Paris. Earle's premature departure was due to our inevitable delays en route. Have fun bro, we're going to miss you.

In what was becoming de riguer for the team we once again got a late start. We wanted to ensure that Earle's travel plans were cemented, we all needed to exchange money and we all needed to sit down and consult the map and plot a route through Turkey. Another delay was caused by a familiar nemesis; ridiculously inflated telephone bills imposed by the hotel. I had personally inquired about the phone rates from the clerk behind the front desk and after finding them quite reasonable I passed this information on to my fellow team members. A flurry of stateside calls ensued. Lo and behold when we went to check out we were very surprised to find out that we were charged four times the quoted amount. Apparently there was a miscommunication between the clerk and myself. I had asked for the per-minute rate and he had given me the per-unit rate. A unit being fifteen seconds of course. Even our ace negotiator Nick couldn't get them to budge and with much ill will we payed our bills. This was not the first time that we've encountered this type of scam and by now we were fed up with all of the petty ways in which money was unscrupulously extracted from tourists. Another lesson learned en route to earning our seasoned traveler stripes.

One of the clerks felt bad for us. Earlier he had befriended Jeff and I and had personally escorted us to various money changers in a futile attempt to dump our now worthless Iranian Rials (a quest I must add, that Jeff persued religiously, albeit with the same negative results for the duration of the trip). He treated Jeff to some coffee and gave him a lighter. His sincerity helped ease the feeling that once again we had been had by another hotel.

We finally hit the road sometime around noon after bidding God-speed to our wayward navigator/electronics whiz Earle. Our destination was Ankara, some five zillion kilometers away. We would be driving well into the night, even at maximum speed with ideal conditions. Things started out well but it didn't take long before it started snowing - hard. No problem, we will just keep chugging on. Then calamity struck, Hercules started losing power. The alternator was going out on us and we barely had enough juice to run the engine. Combine this with the whiteout/blizzard conditions and we were in trouble. Did I mention that it was also dark out? Lucky for us we had just left a gas station so Nick took the helm of Hercules (to get a feel for the problem) and limped it back to the station where we could mess with it under cover. We jiggled wires and tightened nuts and it seemed to help, but it was apparent that we weren't going to make it to Ankara tonight.

Jeff and I took the lead in Herc while the rest of the gang followed behind as a precautionary measure. In order to conserve juice we drove without the defroster but we just couldn't spare the wipers. We decided to detour to the small town of Zara and see what we could do in the morning.

Zara was buzzing with activity. The cops were everywhere and we soon found out why. The Turkish Minister of Health was in town. A policeman flagged us down and asked us what we were doing and after a brief explanation he made a young local boy get in our car and show us where the town hotel was. Todd got out and went inside to get us our rooms and he was immediately followed into the hotel by two Kalishnikov-toting plainclothes policemen. They didn't kill him so we all went inside and checked in. After Pakistan and Iran, we were pretty much used to seeing men with automatic weapons so nobody was particularly surprised although we always thought it was cool.

Toddo and Chanda were tired so they flaked out. Nick, Jeff, and I went to check out an Internet cafe to see if we could download some pictures, check out our website and of course get an update on the U.S. stock markets. Originally we were going to just pop in, work, and then leave, but the locals were really excited to meet three Americans traveling through Turkey, especially after they saw our site. We ended up staying until 2:30 A.M., BS-ing with everyone who stopped by, most of whom just came from the local bar and were quite talkative. This being Turkey everyone smoked and we were constantly being offered cigs. Not wanting to seem impolite we always accepted, regardless of our growing sense of smoke-related nausea. It was too much for me and I like smoking, Jeff and Nick were dying. A thick fog hung over the room and the next day we all smelled like walking ashtrays. We said our goodbyes and headed back to the hotel for a few hours sleep. If Hercules could hold up we were going to try to make all they way to Istanbul, where we could get a new alternator. Read about that epic day tomorrow.