: views from the Hill

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Where in the world was Sal the Wanderer?

from comments:

No, it's not Corfu, which has a distinctive shape. Looks like Cephalonia lower down in the Ionians, which is where you'd be if you were coming from Cairo and were "past Greece". But you don't give anything specific, not even a bearing for the plane, so I'm going to go for Cephalonia/Zakinthos. But I could be wrong.


Bearing on a plane? Please.

I barely even knew where we were going. The "maps" airlines give in their mags or on their little maps on their screens of their route are rough at best.

I flew ... from Cairo over Greece then France/Belgium ... Normandy Coast (I think), White Cliffs, Ireland and then a lot of ice (LOTS of pics of ice forming and clumping and ice capping and thawing ...) and down through Nova Scotia and Maine and on to JFK.

I'll get the pictures set up and you can see Greek Islands and Mountains and then more and then Flatlands and then Normandy and then Ireland and maybe then you can tell me what I was seeing.

I wished I'd had a real map soze I could take sights on markers and figure out where I was at a given time.

Oh, lah. I had a whale of a time taking pictures of land masses and rivers and weird coastlines and such until I started to worry about the fact I was down to my last ten pics on my last SD card. I needed to save some pics for the JFK->SFO route!

But I'd forgotten that piece would be mainly in the dark and my camera wouldn't pick up lights on the dark plains easily. I could've taken eight more pics (what was then remaining on my SD card) of ice structures and frozen rivers and thawing lakes! If only I'd known ...

Still, 2311 pics: Petra, Jerash, Valley of the Kings (and Queens), Abu Simbel, Alexandria ... pictures of the guys with guns who hung out with us, camels, pyramids, the Coptic Monastery of St. Simeon, Philae, Haoeris/Horus (oh, I have stacks of pictures of Haoeris), piles of spices, trinkets, food, the Aswan Dam, loads of pics of feluccas and the Aga Khan's mausoleum. ... camels, donkeys, more guys with guns, pictures from the train window en route from Cairo to Alexandria, pictures of the library, pictures. ...

... and all of $65 spent on trinkets total including postcards, a galabea for me ($9) and for he ($10) for a see-and-be-seen galabea party (really!), a nice scarab painting on papyrus (we already had papyrus bits from a previous trip but the scarab painting was nice and "support the local economy" and all that), a set of David Roberts prints of Petra, more postcards, two $2 hematite necklaces, a $2 carved bone letter opener ...

Oh, spendthrifts are we. ...

Our biggest expense used to be developing and printing the pictures I took on trips. Now, with a digital camera and handy reusable SD memory cards, we spend next to nothing beyond the trip itself.

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