Bye Bye Blogging :(

My laptop is dying. It has been having troubles since we got here. Now it's operating only minimally. I'm running purely on battery now. Yet another new thing to buy when we get home.

Anyway, I am posting this to let you know that unless Jeff can fix it (and I really doubt he, or anyone, can fix it), then I won't have a big chance to blog anymore until we get home. That goes for uploading photos onto flickr too.

So you'll just have to wait (on pins and needles, to be sure) until next month to hear about our trip to Turkey. And Egypt too, I guess, as I haven't got around to blogging about that either.

We still aren't sure when excatly we are coming home, but it will be the first week of April.

See you stateside!

Running out of Time!

Just wanted to check in to let you all know that we are alive and well and, well, busy!

We travelled to Egypt last week. We saw the pyramids and took in Tut and cruised down the Nile. We had a wonderful time and pictures and commentary are up on the Flickr account. Click the photo stream on the right to go to the site. I'll blog about it later, when I have more time.

Over the weekend we went to Jerusalem and Haifa. Visited various museum and the Western Wall and the Baha'i gardens.We hope to get a trip in to Masada and the Dead Sea before we leave in a little under three weeks, but there is a lot to do and see before we go.

In a few days, we are travelling to Istanbul, Turkey.

We are enjoying ourselves and creating great experiences and memories. But sometimes it feels like we are on the tv show Amazing Race. We speed from one country to the next devouring culture and history. And then home for a little while and then, bam, it's onto the next place, with yet another language and currency.

When Jeff and I normally travel, we are usually pretty easy going about the whole thing. We take an attitude of, "we'll be back." We are not in a rush. Things unfold organically and we come back having not only seen great sites, but also with a true feel of the place, and the people and their way of life. We plan our trips a few months in advance and check out travel books and read fiction about the region we're going to. Learn a little bit of the language. Usually it takes a long plane ride to get where we are going. And when we arrive, we arrive!

But the Great Pyramids of Giza were an hour and a half flight away! I barely picked up a travel book before we left. I was too busy recuperating from the last trip. And we are headed to Istanbul in just a few days, and I just opened the travel books yesterday. It takes about two hours to fly there from here. Two hours! My mom lives more than three times farther away from my home in Portland than I am from Turkey right now. This whole Middle East adventure has become an exercise in 'winging it'.

Maybe after I get back to Portland and take a good long nap, and really look over the more than two thousand pictures that I have taken on our four month vacation, I will be more appreciative and the scenes will settle into my psyche. But right now I am travelling too much. My visits to countries have taken on the persona of Daniel Day-Lewis' character Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, “I drink your MILKSHAKE. *SLURP* I drink it up!”