Saint Augustine once said "The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page". It is time to open the book. After years of talking about it and years of saying "...someday I'll go..." my trip is booked and I will be in Egypt next year. Too many travel shows and too many books set in far away exotic places have left me with the desire to pretty much go everywhere. I've been very lucky that I've gotten to travel a fair bit in my own country but I've never set foot past it's boundaries.
Although I feel like a bit of a late bloomer (by the time I go I'll be 28), I'm finally making the leap and will be going to Egypt in September 2010. It'll be a ten day trip with a company called Gecko's Adventures covering the highlights that Egypt has to offer. Egypt has fought with a safari in Africa for the top two spots in my "Places to See/Things to Do" list, and what amounts to a mental flip of the coin has led me to pick Egypt as my first destination. Gecko's seems like a good mix of "hand holding" and independent travel so I don't think I'll have a "stuck on the bus" experience but at the same time there'll be someone around to keep me from getting myself into trouble.
Even though the trip is still over a year away, I've started planning and getting things in order. Among those things is getting travel insurance and thanks to the advice of the venerable Lonely Planet people I found World Nomads. They seem like a decent company and a good fit for what I had in mind. On top of my travel insurance they threw in this free travel journal so I thought I'd try to make use of it. I'm kicking things off with this post but there probably won't be much more activity on here until next year when I hit the road. Maybe as the mood hits me I may login and review some travel gadget or the like that I've stumbled across, but hopefully the next serious post you see on here will be from Cairo. Until then, it's late here in Virginia and I'm going to get some sleep and hopefully dream of far away places.
