Monthly Archives: November 2007

Our Trip By The Numbers

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So here’s a quick rundown of our trip by the numbers, full of fresh statistics. Possibly interesting, possibly obsessive? You decide!

-1269
Lowest Altitude – The Dead Sea, Jordan
-46
Lowest Latitude in Degrees South – Invercargill, New Zealand
1
Movies Appeared In – Mumbai, India
2
Ferries Sailed Upon
3
“New” World Wonders Visited – Great Wall of China, Petra, Taj Mahal
8
Bikes Rode
9
Visa’s Obtained
12
Trains Boarded
13
Longest Flight (In Hours) – Hong Kong to Johanesburg
14
Countries Visited
15
Languages Spoken (Okay, Listened to)
17
Airports Visited
18
International Borders Crossed
20
Flights Boarded
30
Longest Bus Ride (In Hours) – Cape Town to Windhoek
34
Passport Stamps Received
37
Buses Boarded
42
Longest Train Ride (In Hours) – Trivandrum to Delhi
47
Highest Latitude in Degrees North – Ulaanbataar
115
Highest Temperature (in Ferenheit) – Agra, India
315
Days Traveled
994
Longest Bus Ride (In Distance by Miles) – Cape Town to Windhoek
1,926
Longest Train Ride (In Distance by Miles) – Trivandrum to Delhi
7,375
Longest Flight (In Distance by Miles) – Hong Kong to Cape Town
14,271
Highest Altitude – Litang, Sichuan, China
53,916
Total Miles Traveled
 

NYC

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If you can make it there...

If you can make it there...


New York City, Sinatra used to sing that if you could make it there, you could make it anywhere. For us, if we could make it there, the trip must be over. It makes sense to make this our last leg on the trip, it’s the city (along with Las Vegas) that most people outside the US think of when they think about America.

What did we do? Not much, visited with our friend Karen and I like to think we did a self-guided walking tour of Brooklyn and Manhattan. But mostly we just hung out and walked around the city for a few days. Neither of us has been here in a while and it was fun to see how the city has changed.

I have to say that we did have one remarkable accomplishment that should not pass without mention. Nowhere on our trip did we stoop so low, in our travels around the world not once did we even think of doing this, until we got here. We piggy-backed off of someone else bumming off of the kindness of their relatives. If you will:

New York hotels are expensive and we just didn’t want to throw down very much cash when we came up here, so somehow we made arrangements to stay with our friend Karen from DC, who is living with her sister in Brooklyn. On the first read through that may not sink in, but we bummed off of someone that was already bumming off of someone – in a New York apartment! It was cozy up in there, but we made it work. Feeling this something of a masterstroke in the art of traveling it is now entirely appropriate that we go victoriously back to DC.

The Byways of Dallas

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Sometimes the road less traveled...

Sometimes the road less traveled...

Dallas, Texas is all together different from Oregon. Goodbye green, hello brown. Goodbye wooded mountains, hello scrubby flatlands. Goodbye rain, hello warm weather and sunny skies. So it’s not all bad.

If Portland was the City of Roses I suppose Dallas has to be the City of Byways. They love a road here, and not just roads – Highway, Parkway, Tollway, Freeway, Expressway, Turnpike – Dallas has them all, no shortages of roads, cars or traffic here.

We’re in town to visit LeeAnne’s brother and his family, and since they are getting ready to move to Houston, we figured we’d better hop to it and do some Dallas sightseeing. Dealey Plaza, where Dallas was founded and President Kennedy was shot was on the list. We visited the “Sixth Floor Museum” dedicated to the events in and around the shooting. We tried to visit the adjacent “Conspiracy Museum” but were told that it is permanently closed (Possibly that is part of the conspiracy as well). We visited Deep Ellum. We experimented with the Tollway versus the Freeway. We drove through a few toll gates that maybe we shouldn’t have driven through and we drove back to Frisco and hung out with LeeAnne’s Fam.

There was a day trip to Austin, but I have to say, aside from the Tacos (which are of very high quality), and the Texas Thrift Store (also of the highest quality), Austin was kind of a letdown. Maybe we should have saved the trip for SxSW, maybe we should have gone to a taping of “Austin City Limits”, maybe we should have just gone Two-Stepping, but we were a bit underwhelmed.

Maybe the most notable part of this leg of our trip is that we are now officially done with our OneWorld tickets! By the paper tickets we’ve had with us since January, we were suppose to fly to Auckland via LA on Oct. 29, but we are headed back to DC. Is the trip over? Kind of. We may go up to New York for a few days, let’s call that “The End”.