Good to get on my way after a 52-hour wait in a dirt-cheap hotel on Instanbul's western ouskirts for Turkish Airways to get my bike to me, having left it behind in Stansted.
Clear day.
The route steeper than I'd bargained for - but enjoyed the day's ride. Began by climbing the hills overlooking Büyükçekmece and the Marmara Sea Coast. Cheaply-built nearly wholly unoccupied houses and flats line the seafront. Up the hills are better-built houses - many probably just for week-ends & holidays. Some farmsteads. All houses built in last few decades - not an older property anywhere to be seen. Land intensively farmed, mostly with grain crops plus a few family vineyards. No-one around. Roads pretty deserted. It is the last day of Ramadan in Turkey, so maybe everyone is lying in bed. Dogs bored out of their skulls lie by or often in the middle of the road. Some rouse themselves to bark and even chase the British cyclist - but for today at least - they were all cowards at heart and did not engage at full throttle.
The RidewithGPS route's roads were often unmade, and one of their off-road tracks turned out to be a ploughed field, requiring several km of detour.
Çercezköy a busy bustling town. Men sitting in cafés talking & smoking.
Then on through an extensive semi-built industrial park - a farmer still spraying his small plot between the behemoth warehouses and factories.
The typical landscape featured farmland sown to grain crops, a few warehouses, a few crumbling unoccupied dwellings of yesteryear, some low-rise modern apartment blocks, one or two gated houses of the better-off, and several wind turbines.
Çorlu - lots of movement, few hijabs, shops & fast-food stores all downmarket, slums on the town fringes, lots of men with little to do, two or three older ones try to shine shoes or sell tiny packets of tissues.
Early dinner of substantial kebab, salad and Knafeh.
A street strawberry-seller near the hotel shouts to attract custom. Hope he doesn't keep me awake (in bed by 8pm!)