I have wanted to visit Turkey for a long time. When we started thinking about our honeymoon, I really thought we should go to Turkey and Greece. They are close to one another, it would be a great blend of history and culture but also beach and relaxation.

However, when I started to look into the actual travel execution, it turned out it was pretty expensive to travel to Greece, and there wasn’t a great method for getting around.

It seemed like it would be easiest to just get to one of the islands and stay put unless we wanted to spend a lot of time figuring out where we needed to be each day, which I did not think my husband would enjoy.

That led to our looking into cruises that would port in both Greece and Turkey, which would cover the transportation between. I had never booked a cruise before and had no clue how many cruise lines, ships, itineraries, ports, etc. you had to take into consideration, or how often each ship left.

Just picking one that left in line with our arrival following our wedding narrowed done a ton of options I would have considered. But we needed some mechanism for paring down our list, so it worked out in the end.

We ended up with MSC cruise line and a ship named the MSC Divinia that left from several locations. I loved that we could see which port was the cheapest and most convenient to travel to and then determine where we would initiate the cruise.

It turned out Istanbul was the cheapest ($850/person round-trip airfare) and it was also where we wanted to spend most of our time before and after the cruise.

Turkey was as incredible as I had hoped, and I would love to go back and discover more of the country. Below are a few snapshots from our time in Istanbul pre-cruise, the waterfront during our layover before heading to Romania post-cruise, and then our final days exploring the Old Town.