After seeing the forecast yesterday, we decided to wake up extra early today to get to Lake Bled before the forecast thunderstorms were supposed to come in around lunch time. In the end the forecast turned out to be completely wrong and the only rain we saw all day was just as the sun was setting when we arrived at our hotel outside Bolzano.

Today was our first full day in Budapest, and it really feels now like the 'travelling' part of our trip is over, and we could easily be on a weekend break in Europe at this point. There are seemingly more tourists than locals in the city centre, including lots of British and Americans which we haven't seen many of previously on the trip.

A short post today since we didn't do very much in the end. After oversleeping due to Lucy waking us up with teething pain at 4am and taking some time to get back to sleep, we left Skopje later than planned about 10.30am. This wasn't ideal since there was 5 hours of driving to do to Belgrade, and that was if the border between North Macedonia and Serbia was to have minimal queues.

This morning we set off nice and early to try to get to the Bulgaria/North Macedonia border before it gets too busy. We had absolutely no idea what to expect from this border (or from North Macedonia for that matter), and all we had to go by was a bit of traffic showing on Google Maps, though Google has been very wrong about time taken to cross most of the borders so far.

After 10 nights in Turkey, today was finally time to say goodbye and cross back into Eastern Europe at the Kapikule/Kapitan border of Turkey and Bulgaria. It was only about a 20 minute drive from our hotel to the border post, and the road took us parallel to the River Maritsa which marks the Greece/Turkey border in this area.

Today was our second full day in Istanbul of the trip, and we had originally planned to do a free walking tour of the old town in the morning. However we couldn't find a suitable one which didn't involve going back inside the Hagia Sophia, so we decided to give that a miss and go straight to the Dolmabahçe Palace on the shore of the Bosporus instead.

This morning was our final excursion in the Cappadocia region, to Uchisar Castle which we decided to postpone from yesterday to today. The castle is known to be quite a good sunset and sunrise spot, but we couldn't face another 5am start, and instead had a leisurely breakfast and arrived at the car park below the castle about 9.30am.