Scott & Cheryl McLean, Edmonds, Washington

This blog is to share our experiences from our 2017 “Around the World in 60 Days” trip in search of the greatest engineering sights of the world.  Don’t worry, I have gone out of my way to avoid engineering jargon, so it will read more like a travelogue being experienced by ordinary travelers, although through an engineer’s eyes in my case.  There were no tour buses, and we set it all up ourselves with no assistance from any tour company, mainly because we could not find any tour operators that do a trip like this.  So with us making all the arrangements there were lots of glitches and wrinkles along the way, which made it an adventure.

Who are we?  I am a retired civil engineer with an interest in history, my wife Cheryl is a retired community college instructor, and we both love to travel.  We are long-time residents of Edmonds, Washington, a small-town suburb on Puget Sound between Seattle and Everett.  The idea of going around the world to see the most technically or culturally important engineering sights came to me some time before my retirement in 2013, and the idea had enough of an exotic appeal that it really grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.  With the intervention of other events, trips, and the arrival of 3 grandchildren, it took until 2017 to get organized and actually do it.

Generally, we departed from Seattle and headed westbound to Japan, China, Kuala Lumpur, India, Dubai, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Italy, Switzerland, France, the UK, and back to the U.S. for stops in New York City and Chicago before returning to Seattle.  It was daunting, sometimes stressful, and almost always exciting.

To follow along with our adventures, go to the “World Trip Blog Posts” menu at the top of the screen and select any post that interests you.  Or, click on the hyperlinks in the paragraph above, or click on the thumbnail links below to go directly to one of our destinations.

This is a new blog … we returned home to Edmonds in May of 2017, and we are still adding new blog posts to round out the story. We will keep on adding posts until we get to the end of the story.

The process of getting all this compiled into this blog is taking way longer than I expected so it will be continuing for some time.  If you are on our mailing list for our e-mail posts, you will notice that the blog posts have been updated and smoothed out.  This website collects them all in one place.  We still have several blog posts to go: to finish out the UK, then on to New York, Ohio and Chicago before returning to Seattle.

We hope you enjoy,

Scott & Cheryl McLean

June 2018 Update:  we are adding a new blog for this year’s trip — this time a road trip following the Lewis & Clark Trail from St Louis to Astoria, Oregon.  We will get a solid dose of early American history from the early 1800s on this trip.  Click on “Following the Lewis & Clark Expedition” at the top of the Home page to follow along with our posts.

Scott & Cheryl

 

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