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…
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…
5/1/2017 Roman Arena, Roman Games, Mostly sunny. 46F/64F 5/2/2017 Pont du Gard Roman Viaduct. Rain, clearing mid-afternoon. 45F/64F 5/3/2017 The Millau Viaduct. Mostly sunny, becoming partly cloudy. 48F/68F From Geneva we caught a train to Lyon, France. You have to go through customs from Switzerland to France because Switzerland is not in the EU, but it required no more than a glance at our passports by French customs at the Geneva train station. The rail route follows the canyon of…
Part 20, Ahh, Paris & the Eiffel Tower 5/4/2017. Sun and showers in Paris, 63F When we left off on Part 19, we had just finished seing the sights of Nimes, France. On the morning of May 4th we caught the TGV (Tres Grande Vitesse, or Very High Speed) bullet train from Nimes to Paris. Man, that TGV flies! Of course it’s not as fast as a jet, but you can’t see the speed when you’re in a plane at…
5/5/2017. Mostly cloudy with some hazy sun. 63F At last, after all these years: Versailles, which we had never seen. We walked from our hotel down to the Seine to catch the RER “C” line train from the Pont de l’Alma subway station that we scoped out the night before. Had a heck of a time getting tickets out of the ticket machines … it took about 5 tries to get them. The only saving grace was that even the…
Part 22, Paris: Notre Dame and the Louvre 5/6/2017 Drizzle tapering off mid-afternoon. 54F The day after Versailles was a wet one with drizzling rain, so we were not in a hurry to go anywhere after our usual mid-morning breakfast buffet. Boy we sure got lucky with the weather for Versailles yesterday! Yours truly got in a good 1½ hour nap after breakfast and I was ready to go not long after that. Cheryl decided not to go out in…
Part 23, The Channel Tunnel; Arriving in London Date: 5/7/2017. Drizzle in Paris, partly cloudy in London. 50F/65F The process of leaving France to go to the UK kind of blindsided us. Despite the Brexit vote, both France and the UK were still both members of the EU so there should have been minimal formalities for this border crossing, right? Wrong. After being subjected to a disorganized TSA-type security check at the Paris Gare du Nord, our train was cancelled…
Monday, 5/8/2017. Cloudy, clearing late. 46F/55F We took a day for needed rest and catch-up the day after we arrived in London. Typically we had a day like this at about once a week to catch up on journals, back up and label photos, work on these postcards for home, make detailed plans for the coming days, and catch up on rest. The Premier Inn breakfast buffet was a bit bland after the absolutely fabulous buffets that we had elsewhere…
Part 25, Hampton Court Tuesday, 5/9/2017 Weather: cloudy, becoming partly cloudy. 46F/56F Before leaving for Hampton Court, I worked on our Jerusalem postcard through most of the morning, and went through online bills from home to make sure they were covered. It was the story of our trip: there was never enough time! So it was around 1:45 pm by the time we got away from the hotel. The good part about the late start was that we didn’t have…