Azerbaijan Here We Come

It took a while to get to the Maiden Tower in Baku from Colorado.

This is a much-delayed post of our trip to the Caucasus. I am starting it after we have been traveling for about 10 days, so the first few days will be more of a recap.

Our trip started with Katy getting off of work and not taking a nap, and having a five-hour layover in Dallas on our way to Miami. Katy managed to grab a few cat naps in the area of the lounge away from Archer and Rose.

We really enjoyed Hollywood Beach and the boardwalk.

We spent 2 days at Hollywood Beach. The first was rather rainy and involved Archer and I going to the Bass Pro Shop and seeing the light rail station. The second was spent with a lot of playing on the beach, swimming in the 87° ocean, and the pool. Our final day we did a 4 PM checkout, and Rose was able to get a 90-minute nap to cap off playing on the beach.

Free slushies at the hotel (also a terrible photo)

We then headed to the airport, and due to us flying on award tickets and Qatar Airways only releasing two business class reward seats that we could book with points per flight, Rose and I were on the 8 PM flight and Katy and Archer were on the 11 PM flight.

She mainly enjoyed the potato chips and Fanta

Rose scored a B+ on the flight where she ate her dinner, watched a little TV, and then fell asleep for 8 to 9 hours. She woke up, had 2 to 3 hours to eat some breakfast and watch more TV, and then we arrived in Qatar around 4 PM.

We were at the hotel and checked in around 5 PM, and we played on the playground and walked around the very fancy hotel, which we got upgraded to a two-bedroom suite. It was actually kind of funny because I had reserved two rooms since they did not have a room with two double beds, and they upgraded both reservations to two-bedroom suites, so I canceled one because we did not need four bedrooms.

Rose and I ate some Qatar-style Uber Eats and waited for Katy and Archer to arrive, but Rose did not last that long and promptly fell asleep.
We were planning on going to the beach and enjoying the amazing pool the next morning, but it turned out that we all slept until noon. Luckily, we did not have to leave the property until 1:30 PM to catch our 4 PM flight to Baku, Azerbaijan.

A little playground after our long flight

We had booked a driver to meet us at the airport, and he whisked us away to our accommodation in the walled Old City located in Baku.

I literally took my eye off of Rose for 10 seconds on the flight from Doha to Azerbaijan

We spent five nights in Baku. We spent most of the time wandering around the city: going to the fruit bazaar, railroad museum, zoo, Maiden Tower, walking on the Caspian Sea pedestrian boulevard, going to the kiddie amusement park on the seaside boulevard, and visiting the palace in the Old City. We went on one excursion outside of the city to the Gobustan mud volcanoes and petroglyphs, using the same driver we had booked to take us from the airport. There is no way I can get caught up writing play by play, so I will now tell the rest of Baku in photos.

Azerbaijan has a lot of oil money and its leader must have read that pretty fountains are a good way to show off your wealth. Wandering our first morning looking for a place that served food before 9am (apparently uncommon in this part of the world). The coffee roaster we tried first had a broken espresso machine.

We stayed in the Old City, a 1 minute walk from the Maiden Tower in the picture. Our 3 bedroom apartment was ~$65 per night.

Walking around old town. Lots of street cats and kittens. In the morning you can see food out where people are feeding them and often in corners are small water dishes. Did not see any mice.

The children exploring the view out of the 400+ year old palace window in the old town.

The playground next to our apartment. It gets a D and Azerbaijan gets a C- for public playground access. There were a few more outside of the tourist areas we saw while driving and we did randomly come across one that wasn’t marked in Google Maps, I added it.

The train simulator at the train museum, a museum that didn’t even appear in our guide book. I had done a decent job of adding pins to google maps, and it did help us several times with places to eat and random attractions like this. We had zero issues with English in Baku.

The “authoritarian ruler” of Azerbaijan donated this train made out of gold to the museum. Entry to all tourist attractions had a foreigner price of normally $6 or $10 USD and kids were free, often $1-$2 for locals.

The train museum was in the building which was the original train station.

The Flame Towers dominate the city. At night they light up and have designs, pictures on them.

Guess what. This is the carpet museum. It is supposedly one of the best museums in the country, but we couldn’t muster the energy to take the kids inside.

Baku, which borders the Caspian Sea. There was a walkway with shops, malls, mini amusement parks, carousels, and greenery that was 50-100 yards wide that ran along the Caspian. We stayed a 4 minute walk from it.

A walkway under the main road to get to the seaside. Katy took advantage of the many $0.60 vending machines to get a bottle of water in need. Our first day was shorts weather. The rest were pants weather. Baku is rather windy, and we had one cloudy day that averaged ~20 mph wind, the rest weren’t that windy.

We rode many carousels ($1.80/kiddo and adults could stand next to them)

Archer chose to sit this one out. Weather was mainly in the 60s with enough humidity to give some bounce to Rose’s hair

The seaside boulevard with a mall in the background. Baku was very clean with a lot of trash cans.

We had dinner 3 nights in places that were very similar. They were all in vaulted basements like this. One had live traditional music. They were loud enough to drown out our children, to an extent.

We ordered 5 meals and 2 grocery store orders from Wolt. We mainly ate lunch in the apartment with takeaway (and our first dinner). We ordered diapers, 5l jugs of water ($0.70), beers, snacks, drinks from grocery stores in the app too. This is a mashed potato filled fried dough (minimum order was $3.60 and there was often a $0.60 fee)