Decide where we are going for vacation this year!!!!!

Well, we found a place that was less dangerous, but turned out to be not so friendly to our meager little dollars. We flew into Frankfurt, Germany (AKA Deutschland), and took a train over to Prague (AKA Prague, Czech Republic). In travelling through the Czech Republic from Cheb (which is pronounced like clearing your throat) and Prague (which is laid out like someone duplicating the lines between patches on a crazy quilt), we learned many things. Namely: that there is no continuous railroad line between Cheb and Praha, so we ended up hauling our bags off the train, onto a bus, riding the bus through many kilometers (because they don’t have miles in EU) of beautiful Czech countryside, and then back onto a train to continue our journey to the capitol. Oh—and we learned that “Deutschland ist Scheisse.” This from a guy showing us where to find a hotel after 10 p.m. in Cheb.

Good times.

My daughter, our friends, and I were all set to go to Egypt this year. Woo hoo! Long-time dream and all that. We booked rooms, met and planned, bought visas. Everyone in the party was looking forward to the trip. Since my airline doesn’t fly directly to Cairo, we decided to fly into Tel Aviv and then go overland to Egypt.

Fast forward to today. Rampaging terroristic bulldozers, increasing rumors of Irani-Israeli war, random rocket attacks from the Gaza strip, not to mention riots over food and at border crossings in Egypt have dampened the ardour of some members of our party. So what’s a girl to do? It is simply uncivilized, not to mention downright counterproductive to friendship, to pressure people into taking a trip into a country or situation for which they feel great apprehension, even if your mouth is still drooling over the prospect of gob-smacking ancient art and monuments in close proximity to a market that would be any shopper’s wet dream. Alas—l’amour et les amis!

So all I have to do between now and July 9 is find a location that offers the same intrigue as Egypt with less of the danger and that is just as friendly to our poor lowly little war-smackered dollar.