Today dawned beautifully clear albeit still very windy.  After leaving laundry instructions with our host, we drove back up the road along the coast to admire the scenery and catch a few more ruins that we’d bypassed on the drive down to Kaş.  These are a lesser host of ruins (ruins are everywhere, really), not in the tourist mainstream at all, but it was mostly an excuse to drive along a dramatic ocean road and enjoy the deep blue sky.  Letoon has three temples dedicated to the family group of the twins Apollo and Artemis and their mother Leto.  Leto’s is the largest, although they are all in fairly serious disrepair.  The adjacent amphitheater is small but interesting.  The whole place was very soggy, which is fitting because legend has it that Leto fled here evading Zeus’ angry wife and when local residents refused her water for the twins, she turned them all to frogs.  We didn’t see any frogs, but there were lots of turtles in the pond.  Perhaps they have evolved.  Surprisingly for such an undeveloped and unprotected site, there were well-preserved mosaics in the temple that we would have just stumbled over if we’d not been observant.

Our second stop, Xanthos, was once the grandest city of Lycia but now has rather little to see, not least because most of its grandest monuments are now in the British Museum.  The sarcophagi on top of huge columns are the most interesting features.

Finally we headed to a third site, Patara, not especially because we wanted to see more ruins, but because it is reputedly situated at one of the only true sand dune beaches in all of Turkey, and we wanted a picnic lunch at the beach.  The first surprise was that one had to pay for admission to the rather spread-out historic site in order to get to the beach.  Clever people.  We looked for another approach but finding none suitable for our little car, we gritted our teeth and paid the ten lira for admission and drove straight on through towards the water.  Once we got there and parked, we walked out to the water only to find the wind roaring so hard it was unthinkable to try to sit there and eat.  There were definitely sand dunes though.

We retreated to the parking lot for the archeological site and decided that a picnic up in the upper deck of the amphitheater would be just the trick.  We dragged our little cooler up near the top, pulled out the Doritos and finally had a very late lunch.  It was spectacular (the view and ambiance, not the Doritos, though they were good also).  Despite our initial skepticism, we then walked around the ruins a bit and decided the stop was quite worthwhile.  Patara was ancient Lycia’s major port and very prosperous, so its theater is quite large and it had a wide marble main street that ran from the theater down to the harbor (now silted in, as is so often the case).  The colonnaded street now slopes gently into a pool of water, tended by a herd of sheep.  Other than the sheep, we shared the site with only one other set of visitors, four Germans.

Returning to the hotel in Kaş, this time we didn’t even try to hold the cocktail hour outside on the terrace.  The wind was still howling and the young woman serving us confided that they didn’t know what they were going to do, as another guest had been planning to propose to his girlfriend tomorrow out on the terrace!  We got the impression that this is unusual weather even by their usual spring standards.  Certainly the wind made our decision easier to eat dinner in one more time.  For the third straight night they served about six Turkish dishes without repeating a single one.