....even on vacation! The good news is we are having fun, the bad news is we ran out of money and had to take on some custom hayfield work to pay for dinner! How happy we were to turn the corner and find a small hay crew at work! We had been seeing loads of hay traveling around, but could not find an active hay crew. These guys could not believe we knew how to stack hay and would be in hayfield shortly after we returned to America! Thanks to Kyle we had our own interpreter!... read more

Those of you who work with or live with my dad may not want to read this blog entry...his head is swelling as I type! In Algeria, we all got a great chuckle out of the 40 year old business man approaching dad because he believed, with sincerity, that dad was the star of "The Hunt for Red October." He was sure he was a submarine captain and so embarrassed when we informed him he was inaccurate. At lunch yesterday we were laughing even louder. We are in Douz, a tiny little oasis town on the edge of the Sahara Desert where tourists gather only for expeditions into the sand dunes. In the afternoon, the town becomes quiet and void of activity. Dad and I wandered into a little restaurant that seemed to be manned by ... read more

You know that song about everyone being famous when you live in a small town? (Miranda Lambert) Well, the funny connections of being from a small community never cease to amaze me...even in Tunisia! We have gone our entire trip without seeing an America. We jumped for joy if we could even find a poor soul who understood a little street English. We ran into 2 Canadians who were a bit snooty and pretended they did not understand English (so we counted them as EuroTrash). The locals have assumed us to be French, Italian, Spanish and even the occassional Deutsch (argh!!). On mutiple occassions, I have even been told I am Arab. So you can imagine our delight when we spotted a young couple in the hotel lobby who informally passed our "is that person an ... read more

I know there was some head shaking and tongue clucking when people heard we were not changing our trip after the revolutions began in January and after the situation with Bin Laden. The concerns were valid and appreciated, but we are happy to report we have been having a great time in Tunisia. We have also felt nothing but safe as we move about the country. We have been following the 9 pm curfew and listening to suggestions from hotel staff and the like. However, the signs of revolution are not hard to notice while we are moving about the country. We shared an elevator with a man who had his arm in a cast. Dad made a casual, concerned comment about it looking painful and he informed us it was the result of getting shot! ... read more

We jumped in the Land Cruiser and headed south through the desert and sand dunes to Timimoun. We travelled over 350 miles, but the change in scenery and culture would make you think we travelled to another country. The architecture looked nothing like Ghardaia or anywhere else we have been in Algeria. The dress was very different and did not seem to be nearly as conservative. The women do not fully cover and there certainly are not any "ghosts." The residents of Timimoun are Berbers and many have much darker skin (look more sub-Saharan). Not surprisingly, we did not run into any tourists and being an American seems to make us celebrities. We passed through several checkpoints along our journey to Timimoun, but after we passed through one checkpoint we were informed we could only continue ... read more

We are still having many technical difficulties and Intenet struggles, but we are attempting to send out some photos from our last entery. I am not sure which is more frustrating, the lack of reliable Internet services or getting excited about finally accessing Internet only to find the keyboards are so different that typing consists only of hunting and pecking! Hope this works...hope all is well with you... ... read more