It's in the planning

I'm a true travel geek. I admit that I love the planning of a trip almost as much as I like the traveling itself. Read carefully, I said almost.

This trip is a little tough, especially since I haven't been overseas since 2004. The majority of my solo travel has been in Europe and Australia. Australia was easy, especially because everyone spoke English and stuff was so easy to book over the internet. Europe was more difficult, especially because it was 1997-1999 and the internet hadn't completely exploded yet. The lack of good internet resources for this trip has surprised me. Maybe they are there, but I haven't been able to find them yet. Booking hotels has been pretty simple, and so has transportation- renting cars, bus & train timetables. Finding information on tours has been frustrating, and so has looking at the web pages of individual sights that I want to see, as those are out-of-date or don't seem to exist at all. I haven't even begun to look at the sights where fellow travelers share information, like WikiTravel and Trip Adviser. I've been suspicious of those in the past, but I'm sure I'll look into them after I try to find all the other sanctioned sights.

Now as far as the week traveling to Jordan and Egypt, the only resource I trust so far is the emails I've exchanged with the two really helpful ladies at my respective hotels. They have been so helpful, and with the absolute lack of reliable information on this part of the trip, I don't know if I'd even try that part without them. That last week of the trip is going to be the most exotic thing I've ever done by myself. More coming on that in my next post....