We flew to Amman, Jordan and then rode a bus to our small hotel village outside Petra. While our guide in Egypt couldn’t take away from our experience, our new guide was definitely improved it. Despite being bordered by Isreal, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, Jordan is a very well managed country. The people are [...]

The next day our group planned to fly done to Luxor. The next few days were going to consist of visiting many different sites while cruising up through the Nile. But as we got to Cairo airport things got a bit interesting. First, my dot matrix airplane ticket had the wrong first name (Andy, not [...]

The Cairo sun Crept through our window which nudged me to wake up… Okay Bridget’s hurried push in the right direction may have been the real reason why I got on my feet to take a shower. Despite last night’s great idea to finish the whiskey, getting out to breakfast was seemingly easy. When we [...]

When we arrived at the JFK airport in New York, five women were dressed in their burqa, the traditional black dress covering the entire body and face of a woman, with only the eyes showing. Jason called it the ninja wear. And as soon as I saw this, the diverse reality of where we were [...]

The Big Apple. Wall street. The Empire State Building. New York has much to see and luckily our travels to the great pyramids didn’t begin until Tuesday, so our group – Rob, Shayna, Chris, Ron, Jason, Lisa –  decided to head out a few days early to explore Gotham before the big trip to the [...]

For some unknown reason, my brother Jason decided to grown catnip in his garden this year. I was over there just the other day when he was winterizing it and I asked what one of the plants was. He cut off a couple stems for me and said it was catnip. Our cats haven’t been [...]

Worm Compost Surprises

Every Halloween I wait until last minute to come up with a costume idea. I always get these great ideas on Halloween night, but can never remember them by the time Halloween comes around again. This year I wanted to plan more ahead and came up with the idea of a few friends and I [...]

Bridget, Lisa, Weavers, Gaedtkes, and I are getting ready for our trip to Egypt in the next few weeks. I can’t wait, but I also wanted to get a better sense of Egyptian history. When we went to Peru earlier in the year, I read a great book about the Incas, and I was looking [...]

Come one, Come all. Welcome to the 2nd (bi)Annual Northwest House Crawl This past Friday we got back on track and had our second house crawl. We had our first crawl in 2008 in late December. We even had an ugly sweater theme as we traveled to our house, Rob and Shayna’s, Jason’s, Dinitia’s, and [...]