As the hot, stuffy plane approached the seaside resort city of Bodrum on Turkey’s southwest coast, I closed my eyes and imagined a cool dive into the crystal clear turquoise waters of the Aegean Sea. In late July, I was home on vacation despite record heat warnings. Southern Turkey is always hot in the summer, but the sea breeze and swimming made it seem like an attractive destination, especially after spending the last month in a Geneva heatwave where air conditioning was all but prohibited. Ta.
But when the plane doors opened at Milas Bodrum Airport and I was instantly hit by a scorching 113-degree Fahrenheit wind, I knew this summer would be different. My one-year-old son immediately started crying, and the other passengers gasped and rushed to the bus to the terminal.
We weren’t the only ones feeling the heat.
“I can’t say we had a real vacation. We melted down, it was brutal,” said Cem Tosnoglu, a 28-year-old computer engineer from Istanbul. A week earlier, he had canceled a luxury yacht cruise around Bodrum’s secluded bays due to excessive heat and an unexpected onslaught of deadly biting flies that thrive in hot conditions.
“There was no place to run. We were under attack and had no choice but to return to the air conditioning of our villa,” he said. “The sea water was too hot.”
It’s summer, when European tourism is recovering, with tourists flocking to the continent in droves after three years of pandemic restrictions, despite high airfares and limited accommodation. ing. But the holidays are being ruined by excessive and prolonged heat that reached 118 degrees Fahrenheit in southern Europe in July and wildfires that caused regional evacuations in Greece, Italy and Spain.
In recent years, heat waves have continued in Europe, and according to the World Meteorological Organization, the heat is expected to intensify this summer, with the highest temperature of 119.8 degrees recorded in Sicily on August 11, 2021, and record breaking. There is a possibility that it may be broken.
siesta and portable fan
In mid-July, a tourist waiting in line at Athens’ Acropolis collapsed from heatstroke, forcing the city’s popular tourist attractions to close from the afternoon until the cool evening hours. Visitors to the Colosseum in Rome passed out while waiting in line. An unconscious man had to be airlifted from a beach on the Italian island of Sardinia, local newspaper La Nuova Sardinia reported.
“I tell my clients to adjust their itineraries to take advantage of the post-lunch nap, then postpone the tour to a cooler time of year,” says Sarah Johnson, owner of luxury travel agency Paper Ink and Passport Travel. “I am telling them that,” he said. A company based in Pennsylvania. “There’s a reason they’ve been doing it in Spain and Italy for generations. Walking around in the midday heat or waiting in line can really hurt some people. ”
One of her clients, Scott Maxwell, 52, an account manager at the health insurance company Kaiser Permanente, traveled from Los Angeles to Italy in the midst of the July heat wave and ended up spending most of his vacation away. I ended up staying at a villa. His family rented a house in a suburb about 30 minutes from Rome. The group, which also included my parents-in-law, who are in their 70s, had booked a walking tour in Rome and several trips to Florence, but canceled due to scorching temperatures that exceeded 100 degrees during the trip. I decided.
“We couldn’t even get to Rome because there was no wind at all. It was brutal,” Maxwell said. His wife Hilary braved the heat and went into town with her father for a catacombs tour. “It was really fun, but mostly because it was underground,” she said.
The villa’s air conditioning was spotty and didn’t work in all rooms, but the family set up a living area in one of the cool bedrooms and spent most of the afternoon indoors. In the cool evening hours, they went out to dinner in the nearby medieval town of Sacrophono, carrying a portable battery-powered fan. “There were a lot of great restaurants, but it was still hot, so we sat there with the fan blowing on us and trying to get the sweat off his neck,” Maxwell recalled.
Ron Ross, 50, who works in technology sales, also traveled to Italy from Boston in July with his three teenage children. He worked with Joshua Smith, founder of Global Citizen Journeys, to book private his tours and transfers to help his family avoid the worst of the heat.
“The most important thing was that we didn’t have to wait in line,” Ross said. “When we go to the Colosseum or the Vatican, we see endless lines of people under the hot sun, but then we go to meet our personal guy who takes us through a different entrance, so the whole experience is I felt much more comfortable.”
Most of the Rosses’ tours were booked in the morning, allowing them to rest in air-conditioned hotel rooms during the hottest parts of the day. When the sun set, they went out to dinner.
“The only place we really struggled because of the heat was the city of Matera,” he said of the rocky city in southern Italy known as the “city of caves.” “It was basically on a hill with no grass and it was very hot walking there during the day. It felt like you were baking pizza on a stone,” he said.
Go straight to the beach
Tania Goodman, a 36-year-old accountant from London, saw news reports of ambulances removing tourists from the Acropolis in Athens, then logged onto Booking.com and canceled a hotel in the city center. But she realized that she would have to pay a 50% penalty and she and her boyfriend decided to continue with her reservation but skipped all the tourist attractions and went to the beach instead. I went straight.
“We were there at the peak of the worst heat in late July, and we knew it was going to be bad, but it was like a stuffy, stuffy place where it was really painful to go outside. It was so hot,” she said.
The couple woke up early for their morning walk, but by the time they returned to the hotel for breakfast it was too hot to sit on the terrace. “We basically stayed in our room most of the day until about 6 p.m. when we went to the beach,” she said. “Still, it was boiling and way too hot to drink alcohol. Thank goodness we had water. Swimming was great. The water was beautiful,” she added. .
At his Italian villa, Maxwell appreciated the pool and spent up to eight hours each day for three days under an umbrella. He also took full advantage of the air conditioning in his rental car and took his family to nearby lakes and towns, where they stopped for his spritz of Aperol.
“We drove a lot, but it wasn’t really an adventure,” he said.
The Maxwells then headed to the Amalfi Coast, where the heat had eased and they were looking forward to sailing in the nearby bay. However, when they arrived, the boat tour had been canceled due to strong winds making the sea too rough to navigate.
Looking back on her trip, Maxwell said she still enjoys spending time with her family instead of working. Asked if he would return to Europe, she replied, “Not in July.” It will probably be a shoulder season. ”
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