Years ago when we traveled in Mexico, we used to laugh at people coming south with their motorhomes or campers full of canned food, on the assumption that people in Mexico didn’t have anything to eat. Now, as we travel through some of the most remote countries in the world, some may wonder how do we survive? What’s for dinner?

Our friend Tom Hughey back in California loves to read about our experiences, the people and the interesting places we visit but being a practical kind of guy, he was wondering, about the local infrastructure, so we started photographing items of different nature.

While visiting the Numisi Winery in Velistsikhe, Misha, the Russian husband of Nunu, invited us to tag along to visit their farm where he wanted to pick up some fresh milk.

Happy Thanksgiving!   If you have food in your fridge, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep you are richer than 75% of the world. If you have money in the bank, your wallet, and some spare change you are among the top 8% of the words’s wealthy. […]

We had been looking forward to Georgian wines since we had our last sip of Italian Nero d’Avila. To our disappointment, most of the stores in Georgia stocked plenty of beer, vodka and juices, but rarely wines. Much of the table wine we found in the country was either homemade or produced by wineries and sold in 5-liter plastic containers. It was invariably on the sweet side. This was not Napa Valley, where there is a winery every couple of miles advertising their wine-tasting rooms, tours and picknick facilities.

It was a crisp morning in Cappadocia. Like melting butter, the warm sun was just oozing across the bizarre landscape. People of Göreme discovered that soft rock could be carved into houses. How imaginative! We explored the area on foot and in a hot air balloon.

Meerschaum, (German for foam of the sea), is a soft white clay mineral also known as sepiolite. Pure white Turkish meerschaum has been prized for centuries. The first recorded use for making pipes was around 1723. Our trail led us to the town of Eskişehir and then to the countryside where our search for meerschaum ended at a hole in the ground about 20 feet deep.

We are market junkies, and we’ve wandered through some of the best, but there is only one Grand Bazaar. Call it a “shopping mall” if you want to homogenize it, but Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar is much more. It started as a small market in 1455, and grew into an important trading center on the Silk Road, expanding into what must be considered a city within a city.

After a quick Shish Kebab on the street and a glass of fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice, we headed over to the astounding and fascinating Topkapı Palace and museum, home of the Ottoman Sultans for nearly 400 years.

Some of the most amazing examples of engineering and architecture in the world are places of worship. We had seen a few of the most impressive in Europe. Standing in a class by themselves are the imposing mosques of Istanbul, and we just happened to be camped beneath the most famous one, The Blue Mosque, (called Sultanahmet Camii in Turkish).