Beijing - Part 2 of 2 August 26-30 - 2006 Saturday Another attempt to go to Mao’s tomb, another day not waking up in time…. By the time we got out the door it was 10:30 and so we headed toward the internet café but got distracted first by the Liulichang Jie “hutong” on the way. It’s been rebuilt to look traditional although it is much cleaner than the authentic nearby hutong, featured more touts, and was shiny in the special way that suggest no locals would ever patronize the shops. We walked around a bit and stopped in a couple [View Full Entry]

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Beijing - Part 1 of 2 August 20 - 25, 2006 Coming back to Asia after being in Australia and New Zealand for 9 weeks was a shock to our system. Amy had been looking forward to returning to Asian food and prices for awhile and although the prices did not fail to disappoint we never found our groove with Chinese food. We believe that to find the best Chinese food you probably need to be with someone who speaks Chinese. And the Chinese do seem to enjoy their food. Compared to our other Asian destinations we saw more than a [View Full Entry]

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After nearly two months in Australia we spent two weeks in August zipping around the South Island of New Zealand, a country so beautiful and with people so friendly and charming that there is just no way to do it justice with words alone. They say that pictures are worth a thousand words and we hope that the following 42,000 "words" will paint a colorful narrative of our time here. [View Full Entry]

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It is day 300 of our trip and we are relaxing in London for the holiday. After a month in Turkey we thought a city Christmas would be a perfect interlude before moving on to Morocco, though little did we know that the city we selected completely shuts down for the holiday. Starting late afternoon on Christmas Eve and extending through Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, virtually nothing in London is open for business (including buses, rail, subway, movie theaters and restaurants). Not quite the city Christmas we had in mind. In Washington last year we saw two movies, ate [View Full Entry]

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July 29 - August 3, 2006 Saturday Once we reached Cairns we began to focus for the first time in planning our departure from Australia. Up until that point we knew only that we would be headed to New Zealand and then on to China as we were locked in by our soon-to-expire Chinese visas. So while the other visitors to Cairns bathed in the slow-paced, fun-loving and sun-drenched life that the city is famous for we orbited the internet café / video store piecing together enough information to buy our airline tickets to New Zealand. With that accomplished we deferred [View Full Entry]

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July 24 - 28, 2006 The drive from Hervey Bay to Cairns, essentially the stopping point of our Australian odyssey, represented a pretty big chunk of road. The drive amounted to about 1468.2 kilometers north through Queensland and included a diversity of towns and sites made cohesive solely by their residing in the same state. It felt a little disjointed, this mish-mash of places, but we enjoyed the bright, sunny days of driving along the coast and through fields of sugar cane. Monday, July 24, our first day out of Hervey Bay, we intended to drive to Mackay, a popular jumping [View Full Entry]

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July 17 - 24, 2006 Hervey Bay Hervey Bay is a nice stretch of little towns along a coast rich with recreational opportunities and diverse sea life. The town rests on a migration route popular with humpback whales, who come up from the Antarctic to birth their young, sharks and dolphins. Not far off the coast lie a pair of jewels, Fraser Island and Lady Elliot Island, easily reached from Hervey Bay. The area has grown from 15,000 to 55,000 residents in the last 15 years but retains the feel of a very small community (albeit one frequently overrun with tourists). [View Full Entry]

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We know we are way behind in uploading (ok, writing) our travel journals - in our blog world we are still in Australia and it is July. Our notes keep growing and we are polishing more than a few new postings that we hope to bring to you soon. In the meantime…. Recently we concluded an unplanned but enriching trip through the nations of the Balkan Peninsula, specifically Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, and we now find ourselves eating our way across Turkey. We have a way of being in the right place at the “right” time and we arrived in Turkey [View Full Entry]

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We are in Sarajevo this Thanksgiving though we’re supposed to be spending the holiday in Istanbul. We have been eager to see Turkey and loved the idea of being in Turkey for America’s Turkey Day. About ten days ago Roger developed a few nagging problems that two days ago turned into overwhelming pains in his lower back and groin. This occurred, of course, almost immediately after we purchased our train tickets from Sarajevo to Belgrade for what would ultimately be a thirty six hour train ride to Istanbul. Our two day odyssey navigating the health care system here, which thus fa [View Full Entry]

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July 8 - 10, 2006 Sydney is a very big city of four million people. It features all of the traffic and dense urban culture of London or New York while also sprawling out along the serpentine harbor. Leaving Sydney and moving on to the north was an education in just how far the arms of this goliath reach and the traffic was particularly frustrating as our late start meant the sun was setting. We slept in Newcastle before starting what can only be described as our ultimate Aussie Pie Day. For some reason the landscape between Newcastle and Coff’s Harbor [View Full Entry]

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