Travel Diary: Side, Turkey

November 29, 2013

Before jumping into December, I thought I'd share a few photos from our summer vacation in Turkey!

We spent 10 days at the Blue Waters Club & Hotel at the end of July and beginning of August. It was a 2 1/2 hour flight from Basel, Switzerland and then after arriving we had to take a bus for 2 hours which stopped at a few hotels before reaching the Blue Waters resort.

It was HOT, sunny and beautiful for our whole stay! The can 100% recommend the hotel and resort to all families with children - it's heaven on earth for children there since there are a ton of entertainers and the days are filled with games, activities, shows and much more. If you need some peace and quiet, there are also many spots by one of the 4 pools or at the beach where you can lay out and enjoy the peacefulness. We had an all-inclusive package so we ate every meal at the hotel restaurants and all our drinks and snacks were included. This is a great option so you don't have to carry around cash and keep count of your spending. Every evening there was a themed dinner, delicious food, a theatre show afterwards and always some fun & music to enjoy by the bar / dance area.

I tell ya, you can't get bored there!

The main pool flowed through half the resort - it was so big! This way you didn't really notice how many people there actually was. You never felt like you were in a crowd, although there were around 3'000 guests at this resort!

This is the stage where all the evening shows took place. I don't really have many photos of the resort which I can post since other family members are on the photos but definitely check out the link to the hotel and take a look at their pictures. The resort was really very beautiful and always clean and taken care of.

As I already mentioned, the evening dinners were always themed and above you can see two photos from the Turkish themed evening. The hotel set up a whole dining area out on this huge lawn and we sat at traditional Turkish tables where you sit on the floor. It was really fun to have different themed evenings and to dress up and experience different kinds of food.

A large piece of the beach is owned by the hotel so only guests from Blue Waters were on this beach. This is great and ensures that you have a beach chair and umbrella available. The beach was nice and clean and there were 2 bars, one on the actual beach and the other on that wooden bridge in the picture above. Heavenly!

One evening we took a bus to the dock and boarded a "pirate ship" - which was fun! We were on the boat for one hour, stopped in Side (the city) for some shopping for 2 hours and then got back on the boat to head back to the hotel.

We felt a bit rushed since we only had 2 hours to shop so we decided to take a taxi back to Side a couple days later after dinner to do some evening shopping. So fun!

We also were able to do some fun water activities at the beach (which did cost extra, these weren't included in our pre-paid package). I'm not the biggest fan of water sports but I decided to go along on the water banana.

Well, we hit a wave and were thrown into the water and I swallowed some of the gross salty water and well...ya...

The nice Turkish guy let me ride in the motorboat which pulls the banana for the rest of the remaining time. I was happier in the safe boat than on that flimsy banana...haha... but everyone else seemed to enjoy it!

We also rented jet-skis which was super fun! I rode one with my boyfriend's niece and my boyfriend rode one with his nephew (pictured above). Isn't this photo awesome?! Credits go to my boyfriend's brother-in-law :)

Another really fun thing my boyfriend and I did was go parasailing! We got strapped to a huge parachute which was pulled by a motorboat so we were high up in the air and got to enjoy the "flight" and saw the beautiful ocean around us and saw the whole length of the beach. This was so fun. I can recommend this to anyone who's not afraid of heights ;)

And lastly, on our last evening in Turkey, before going to eat dinner we went down to the beach to shoot some photos and they came out so nice! Get ready for romantic-lovey-doveyness-overload ;)