Key Words: Cheryl & Scott McLean Scott & Cheryl McLean Edmonds, Washington around the world trip trip around the world around the world world tour world trip round the world world travels RTW world travel blog following the Lewis & Clark Trail
Part 11 – the Taj Mahal Date: 4/11/2017 Sunny, 70F/99F The early rooftop breakfast put on for us by the Delhi Shanti Home staff at 6:15 a.m. was very enjoyable — they had their full breakfast staff on hand for us alone, and took this early hour completely in stride as if it happened every day. Our car arrived right on time at 7 a.m. and we were on our way to New Delhi’s Nizamuddin Railway Station to catch the…
Part 12 – Dubai: the Burj Khalifa Date: 4/14/2017 From my point of view, unless you have business there, the main reason to go to Dubai is to see the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper. There’s no question that the wealth and unbelievable development in Dubai is impressive … even breathtaking. And it is enlightening to see how well-managed oil wealth can be put to use to create a vibrant economy and open society, things not always available in…
Part 13 – Egypt and the Pyramids Date: 4/15 & 4/16/2017 The flight from Dubai to Cairo turned out to be quite a geographic show. The takeoff gave us a panoramic view of downtown Dubai and the needle of the Burj Khalifa as we winged out over the Persian Gulf, leaving the tip of the Arabian boot headed northwest passing just over the tip of Qatar. Photo 4102, winging out over smoggy Dubai, the Burj Khalifa rising above the rest…
Part 14 – Athens – The Acropolis and the Parthenon 4/20/2017. Mostly cloudy and windy. 59F/70F. Security in the Cairo airport, where we caught our flight to Athens, was extremely tight. There were three security checkpoints between the terminal front entrance and the gate, including a full TSA-style x-ray check just before boarding the EgyptAir 737. As we settled into our seats on the plane, video screens came down from the overhead, and there was what looked like a series…
Part 15 – Israel: Old Jerusalem Date: 4/22/2017 Just the name “Jerusalem” brings up visions of great and long-ago events, of the mixing of cultures, and of great conflicts of history. As a result of the narratives that have come down over thousands of years, Jerusalem makes an extraordinary destination, including its role as a holy city to the three great Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I’ll admit to some curiosity about how Jerusalem might strike me, an independent…
Date: 4/23/2017 – 4/25/2017 The day after our visit to Old Jerusalem, we took a tour to Masada and the Dead Sea. As I mentioned previously, as soon as you leave Jerusalem eastbound the road descends steeply nearly 4,000 feet from the top of the Judean Hills to the Dead Sea, which is the lowest place on Earth. As you go down toward the Dead Sea the relatively abundant vegetation of Jerusalem turns almost immediately into a barren hillside desert….
4/27/2017. Cloudy, becoming rainy with heavy showers. 55F/70F Cheryl and I had not been to Rome since our trip in 1994 when our daughter Amanda was 10, which was over 20 years ago. The question was: do we need to go there again? I concluded that if we were on a trip to see the greatest engineering works of the world, it would be a good idea to visit Rome again and pay more attention to the ancient engineering than…
No discussion of great world engineering works would be complete without the Great Wall of China. However, since we had visited the Great Wall on a previous trip in 2005 we did not repeat that in 2017. For the sake of the topic at hand, I include some photos and a journal entry from our 2005 trip giving our earlier description of the Great Wall. 6/27/2005. Cloudy and humid. Low: 70F. High: 86F. After lunch, we continued our drive to…
4/29/2017, Geneva Switzerland. Sunny and chilly. 37F/56F And what, you ask, is CERN? For a science guy, CERN is like the Holy Grail – it’s the cutting edge of basic research where scientists work to discover the most basic atomic and subataomic ingredients of the universe and figure out what happened at the Big Bang. If Galileo and Isaac Newton were alive today, CERN is where they would be working. It’s also a sort of understated crossroad of science and…