Off the beaten track

We love how green and spacious our city is compared to Istanbul. At the same time, a lot of the green space in the city is made up of relatively small parks - a children's playground, a patch of grass and a few trees/shrubs. What we miss are woods, or a country park, and having a good walk in that sort of scenery but we don't really live in the right sort of place to find places easily to do that. Although on the plus side, we can go for a walk in summer and hope to see a lizard.

So when I saw a friend posting some pictures on Facebook of their family exploring, I quickly found out where they'd gone and we headed there one Saturday afternoon not long after. I'm looking forward to going back, and I've also heard of another place to go exploring not too far away.

We love that here, it's easy to see where there is a stream or river because there is almost always a line of trees (often poplars) on the river bank that stands out for miles.

And obviously I am far later in posting this that I wanted to be - this all happened back at the start of November. So the photos reflect autumn here rather than winter!