E

Edirne is the place where we said goodbye to Turkey, but also said hello again to Gerry's computer, which had been out of commission and which, miraculously it seemed, was fixed here.

We had decided in Çanakkale that something would have to go. Either we could see Istanbul again, having visited in 1975 en route overland from Nancy to Teheran, or we could spend that time in eastern Europe to investigate Gerry's family roots in Ukraine, and perhaps get into Russia so that Jan could practice her long-lost Russian language skills, and still be in Darlington in mid-July for our nephew Chris's wedding. Well it didn't quite turn out that way, but skip Istanbul we did and so Edirne, closest town to Turkey's border with Bulgaria, is where we headed from Çanakkale.

Edirne is a small town with some dusty semi-rural outskirts and a small but very busy town center. It was here, not far from our hotel, that we wandered by a small shop that sold Sony accessories. We went in to find about perhaps buying a new memory stick for Gerry's camera to give him some additional capacity and were happy to find that the owner spoke good English. Gerry asked if he knew a computer repair shop and he said, "Sure, my brother has a shop upstairs. He will fix it for you." And so it was. The brother had fixed many power supplies. Not for computers, but for digital cameras. The principles were the same and the result for us was a kind of rebirth.