The No. 1 Benefit

I thought I'd share some pictures of our number one benefit of living in Cekmekoy:  access to the forest.   There is this small hill, one block outside of our little neighborhood, and it's a place where people like to go and wander.  It's a hill covered with scrub brush and from the top you get this view of the city.   To the left of this view is our neighborhood and to the right is a trail that leads into oak forest and eventually pine forests.  When the weather was nice, we'd go our with a picnic blanket and lunch and see how far we could get before the shorter legs got tired.  We recently found a road we can drive up to the pine forest so we can start hiking there and actually really get out where there aren't many people.  It's so nice!  Definately what our family has needed:  access to the outdoors!

Here we are on the top of our scrub brush hill enjoying the sunset.  Behind us you can see the pine forest.

Sonora likes to bring "stuff" everywhere she goes and this day the choice of preference was her sewing box and as you can see she stopped to practice a little sewing :)!

This is the path from our neighborhood up to the scrub brush hill.  In the background you can see the "villas" we've been talking about, which are up scale, gated, single family homes.  There are a lot of these going up and already up in Cekmekoy because after the 1999 earthquake the ground in Cekmekoy tested as very solid, which led to a lot of new building and from what I hear, a lot of the wealthy coming out to live, thus these up scale homes.

Here is Malachi trying a little whittling out in the pine forest.  Notice the tie!  Good touch for a day in the outdoors :)!

And some other shots of the kids outside.  When we get further into the pine forest there isn't much trash like there is earlier on.  I'll see if I can find a picture of that. . . . . 

 Here's a walk in the oak forest and coming out of it there is all of this . . . . . .

trash!  It's pretty bad.  It's also sad that this is where we usually stop for our picnic lunch.  It's about where the kids get tired out.  So now that we can drive up to this place, we can now walk beyond it into a much cleaner, more beautiful forest.  

Anyway, I thought you all might like to see this "forest" we've been talking about so much.  It's the place we like to go best, weather permitting.