Following Fragaria

It just dawned on me that if I’m going to do a WordPress travel blog, I can do it on WordPress and actually have more features. So I’ll be doing this very same thing over at Following Fragaria (pt. 2) (octoploid.wordpress.com). Those very few of you who are interested please feel free to drop by! 

This Sunday I’m headed for Egypt. I leave on Sunday, arrive on Monday, fly out Thursday morning. At the subconscious level, my brain is unsure of how to prioritize this trip. On the one hand, it’s only really four days. I generally pack for these four day work trips by grabbing the top four shirts off the “work shirts” stack, a couple pairs of underwear, and an extra pair of pants, cramming them in a backpack 15 minutes before heading to the airport. However, it’s also literally the other side of the world, on another continent (Africa!), within a short drive of one of the Wonders of the World. Thus it feels like a “big” trip, deserving of big, complex preparations. So far my preparations consist of making sure I still remember where my passport is and giving my wife my travel pants to wash the ink out of. 

But anyway, getting back to the whole “Wonder of the World” business: I really want to see the Pyramids.  I’ll only have free time at nights (though probably lots, with an 11 hour time difference I ought to be wide awake) so I won’t have the option of going in them, or wandering the Giza plateau. But still, they light them up at night, so I hope I can at least catch a cab out there and say I’ve seen them.  (The closest I’ve ever come to a Wonder of the World are the bits of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus at the British Museum.)It just dawned on me that this will be the furthest east I’ve ever traveled. Cool.

Starting anything is hard. I find starting blogs harder than most–because a blog isn’t the sort of thing one thinks of as having a start. It’s a continuous stream, without end or beginning. At least that’s how it feels like it should be.Anyway, my idea with this site (which I could just as easily set up on Blogger, where my other blog is, but apparently my urge for novelty won out) is to chronicle all the travel I do for work. I won’t dwell on the work side of things, though, because frankly not many people care about my work, and you’d much rather hear about the other aspects of the trips. And I can’t even promise those will be interesting.There may also be some personal travel that sneaks in here, but since I seem to be running a 20:1 or so business:pleasure ratio in my travel these days, there won’t be too much (though I do have a vacation to Korea planned soon!).Anyway, sit back, enjoy, and maybe I’ll even post something more soon!