Preparations Are Afoot…

Wow.  I thought that a week and a half would be plenty of time to get everything together, pack my stuff away, throw my bakcpack together, see people, party a bit, and maybe to just chill out a little.  Nope.  I got a notebook full of stuff to do, and I don’t seem to be able to cross stuff off nearly as quickly as I want to.  Oh well.

It didn’t help that Egypt Air basically thought that I hadn’t paid them for 3 months.  I double check my reservation Sunday… OH!  not there!  Long story short, their website is crappy (go to egyptair.com in Firefox, and see what happens… you know, with the second-most-used browser in the world), and crashed mid-order.  When I re-entered my order, it went to Cairo, not New York, but everybody for some reason thinks the order is in NYC, so I’ve spent this entire week calling and emailing around, and just being told to email someone else in a different time zone and wait a day. So today I just went to their office and asked very nicely that they give me a ticket.  I had to insist that I was not going to leave without a solution, but they were very nice, and we got this all resolved.  Yay!

Also got my Nepal visa today.  This took a whole 5 minutes, and was very pleasant.

About every other conversation this week has been with people who are rather bowled over by this whole plan.  I guess I’m doing something right 🙂

I’ve closed out accounts, changed addresses, adjusted things, procured items, blah blah blah.  Now (finally) to packing!

So, flight takes off Wednesday evening.  First stop, Egypt.

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Welcome to 2009

OK, so far in 2009, progress is being made.  Regrettably, the Carribean trip has been scrapped entirely.  Due to circumstances beyond our control, the crew of the good ship “Sea Wings” totally punked out.  So that whole leg has been scrubbed.  On the plus side, that does give me a bit more prep time, so here we are.

Preparations are proceeding apace, and things are shaping up nicely.  The adventure begins on February 11, when Tadhog flies to Cairo.  I’ll be spending the following couple weeks in Egypt with the infamous Secret Weapon “Double D”, before proceeding further East.  Excitement and anxiety are both creeping in.  Stay tuned for more details.

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Introducing The “Tadhog Goes Walkabout” Blog

At one point in college, I became very frustrated about having learned so much about our world, yet having seen very little of it (at that point, I had never been further West than Ithaca, New York).  I got a passport and jumped on the next west-bound train.  I’ve had a hard time sitting terribly still ever since.

After my cross-country trip, I envisioned 3 great Eurasian journeys.

1. across Europe

2. down the Pacific Coast of Asia and Australia

3. across the middle

Trip number one came together largely as planned in 2002.  Trip number two was largely sated by living in Japan for 2 years and travelling while there.  Now we begin trip number 3.  Follow me as I make my way through Egypt, the Gulf, India, Nepal, SE Asia, and much of China.  It should be very interesting.

Buy before we get into all that, 2 weeks on a ship in the Caribbean sounds refreshing, doesn’t it?

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