I finished my novel! I wrote over 50,000 words in the month of November, on a novel I haven't named yet. It's the second in a series - a fantastic spy novel. Here's the (as yet unpublished) jacket blurb: The terrorists who blew up superspy Nathalie Qadir's city...
These are my flights so far this year, totalling 128,674 miles. The Internet is very cool! More soon from Alaska...
An absolutely alphabetic itinerary: Afghanistan to Zambia, to Zimbabwe, and back to Afghanistan. Can anyone else say they have gone from the front of the alphabet, to the back, and returned to the front? Ask the lady at the Executive Platinum Desk who made it possible...
A night in Dubai. I had a layover between Afghanistan and Zambia at DXB, and I had read that there were some FlyerTalkers celebrating a birthday there. I took a cab downtown and had dinner with them, and looking out over the balcony of the restaurant I could see the...
I've arrived without a hitch, after that long wait in the Dubai airport. I feel much better, having slept on the flight to Kabul. The guest house and compound where I'm staying is extremely nice, and seems well "fortified." There are armed guards who have worked for...
I woke up on my birthday in Harare, Zimbabwe. A quick run, breakfast, and the taxi was ready to take me out to a safari day camp about 40km from the city. We got stopped twice by cops - I think a face like mine looks like "MONEY" as they see us pass, and they want to...
Dad came to DC in September for a reunion of sailors from the U.S.S. Hornet. Dad's in the upper right corner, the classy looking one. I heard stories... these guys have lived a lot. I never knew Dad was an electrician working on the gyroscope of the ship. There were...
I love, love, love Buenos Aires, with the food and the wine and the people and their outrageous accents, like characters in a Fellini film. Here I'm sitting at a beautifully laid table, awaiting the pouring of the vino. And there it is! Wine has left the bottle. The...
Fantastic fresh foods everywhere we went, for so little money - this was what I found all over Cambodia. Bright red peppers spicing up veggies, cooked so lightly it was eating vegetables the way God intended. Lemongrass and greens flash cooked in oil and added to...
I contacted a friend-of-a-friend who lives there as soon as I arrived, and she signed me up for a bike ride with a bunch of expats. We pedaled out of the downtown Phnom Penh area past traffic that is charitably described as terrifyingly chaotic. Motorbikes are the...