I can't decide if it was the longest day of my or the day that never happened. It's all a matter of perspective really. It was almost exactly 31 hours from the time that we left the house to our arrival in Queenstown. The flight was shockingly not as terrible as we'd expected, keeping in mind we did travel fully around the globe; we were tired. I had heard that flying into Queenstown was an adventure, but I hadn't really understood why until we were landing. ...

We had rented a car straight from the airport, so it was easy to grab a coffee and get out of town. We headed straight for Geysir. As a child, I had learned all about Old Faithful in Yellowstone, but this was going to be my first up close and personal. And as luck would have it, it was the original Geysir ever discovered in the world! Hurray for adding new superlatives to my list- oldest Geysir- check! It was big and impressive as was the waterfall and sur...

After a short overnight flight that was way too bright- Iceland Air felt compelled to give a northern lights display for the ENTIRE flight- we arrived in Reykjavik. It's a very pretty and very small place. We wandered around and did the Reykjavik thing- ate hotdogs and drank hot beverages! Apparently hotdogs are a big thing here. We were intrigued and then sorely disappointed at the results. We pretty much saw the whole city in a day and even squeezed in t...

We picked up our car in Jerusalem and had our first real adventure- driving! Brian got comfortable quickly on the highways, but was less than pleased with the city driving. Luckily we didn't have to do a lot of that. We headed down to the Dead Sea and spent the night in a town called Arad which required a lot of twists and turns into the mountains and several signs warning against "deadly curves" and an odd looking animal that I could only determine to be a sh...

I've been finding it difficult to write about Amman. It's a fine enough city with a lively old area and a surprisingly modern and upscale new city. You see, the problem is that it was freezing and pouring with rain (or hail or snow as the case may be) most of the time we were there. That sort of clouds opinions. We managed to have a couple of excellent meals and meet some interesting people. A man named Kair invited us to sit in his café and drink mint tea...