Visiting the Pyramids

It was fourteen years ago today that we were visiting the Pyramids of Giza.

A few funny moments on that day:

We hired a driver to take us on a tour of the nearby pyramids, including Dashur and Saqqara, and for whatever reason, he decided he would bring his neighbour to do the driving. He seemed pretty excited to introduce him to us. We stopped at the bank so that I could get some cash. At the time, it was right around five Egyptian pounds to the Canadian dollar. I made a point of carefully counting my pounds so that I was sure that I got out what I punched in…before I took my card out of the machine. "Make a hiss or a whooshing sound out loud," I wrote on the blog that evening. "That is the sound my card makes as it disappears into the slot." Getting my card back involved waking a bank employee from his early morning siesta and convincing him that having my card back on my person was a matter of some importance.

Fifteen minutes later, it was amazing to my nose that the smog of Cairo followed us confidently out into the countryside. Eventually, we came to realize that the smog dissipated rapidly once a window was rolled down. Windows stayed open for the remainder of the drive.

Not only had civilization crept up on the Pyramids of Giza by 2007, the corporate world had crept into Egypt as well. But with money to be made on hungry tourists, anxious for a taste of home, the corporate world is as the corporate world does.

It's interesting to look at Google Maps now to see how much more developed the area around the pyramids is these days. 

Later that night, the four of us were stuffed into a berth on the overnight train to Luxor. Within minutes, everyone was asleep, while I wrote about our day of chasing bank cards and ancient marvels.

All in all, December 6, 2007 was a good day.

Our first approach on the Sphinx, and the Pyramids beyond.

The View from the Pizza Hut across the street.

If you're interested in more of our travels, scroll through the blog, or check out our books.

Stories of our travels through Europe and the Middle East (including Egypt) are found in Today I Ate Cow Stomach.

Our three months in India make for an exhaustingly beautiful read, in The Happy Accident.

Our sometimes weary sojourns throughout Southeast Asia, as well as the preparations for an art show based on our travels are written about in Distant Early Warning.

All Those Books

It has come to the attention of my agents and entourage that my many books and book titles are confusing people. While I enjoy a good practical joke every now and then, it was not my intention to have people buying more books than necessary.

So here is a primer on all the books available from 275Days.

We'll start with the most recent…actually, no, that's probably going to be more confusing and not very helpful. Let's start at the beginning, maybe that will clear things up. The real beginning, for me. For this story, at least.

A bunch of years ago now, we had a super cool opportunity, and out of that, we took some time off to travel around the world with our two kids for nine months. Before we left home, I was thinking about how to keep family and friends informed of what we were doing, and a blog was the best I could come up with. Nine months is pretty close to 275 days, so that's where the name of the blog came from. (Actually, if you subtract our departure day and our return day, we were gone for 275 days.) What I did know was that I would take lots of pictures in lots of cool places, and people would probably be interested in that. This was 2007, so youtubing while travelling was not really a big thing, and I didn't want to be spending the trip videoing everything and then being glued to a computer during all of our down time. 

I won't get into the details of the trip here, but the low down is this:

One month in Italy

Five weeks in Greece

Four weeks in Turkey

About two weeks each in 

Syria

Jordan

Egypt

Eleven weeks in India

And the final two months for a rush job of 

Thailand

Cambodia

Vietnam

and Laos

I started writing before we got to Rome, the first place on our itinerary, and did not let up until we left the airport in Incheon, Korea, on our way back home. 

I ended up with a couple hundred posts, with more than thousand pictures on the blog. That's just a guess. I never actually counted how many pictures I included, but it was a fraction of the twenty thousand I took. And those two hundred-plus posts clocked in at over 150,000 words. Yikes, what a mouthful.

I spent a couple years preparing for an art show in 2010, and then had more time to think about the value of all those words and photos. It seemed a shame to just have it sit on the computer in our house, only to be seen on anniversary dates of being here or there, or when we (I) were feeling particularly nostalgic. But as I reread the blog, two things were clear: there were a lot of great stories lingering in that mass of words, and; it deserved a far better fate than to simply disappear in an electronic recycling depot. A book seemed like the logical answer. After a bit of editing and a lot of designing, I came up with a book so massive that it required two volumes. The online printing service, Blurb, had a page limit and I was well over. At this point, two more things were clear: it would need considerably more editing, and: it was beautiful. This could work.