rewind 2006:

i've always dreamt of going on that big roadtrip - the one where you have no job until you need one, the one where you don't really know where you are going until you are forced to look at a map, the one where you live each day as it comes until you realise you have no more tins of beans and have to get to a town with a shop...

and that's what eric and i did from january - october 2006.

and part way through eric proposed and i said yes and we set the date for february 17th 2007!

in october i headed to egypt to work on a dig and had one of the most incredible experiences of my life. i found a couple of excerpts from emails i wrote when i was there... bringing back images of life - the good and the ugly...

"at first we lost power - not the end of the world and it did come back after about 24 hours. for a time. it was down again yesterday. but then the septic tank got full so we needed to get a truck in to empty it. then the truck got stuck in the front yard spilling some of its contents... finally it made it up the drive only to dump the waste literally on the other side of the road. the stray dogs loved this of course and enjoyed coming back over to see us after having a play. this was repeated all day long so for that day the toilets were out of action. later on in the day the water mains cut out across the village. we were without water for 3 days. this caused so many people to get sick - we only had the turkish toilet but no water to clean it off with. there were girls throwing up and girls with bad diarreha so basically that toilet became offlimits pretty quickly. illness spreads like wildfire when theres no water. we do of course have a supply of mineral water for drinking but that didnt make too much of a difference. the water came back yesterday finally only to decide to break down again today. and then the power went down again when the truck trying to fix the water problem broke a line in the road. how much worse can it get? so many people are sick..."

"this afternoon im heading off to the biggest souq in cairo. its a crazy colourful place with so many different smells and sights. i love it there and am able to lose myself in the tiny alleyways of stalls. i have a way of closing out the world and not listening if i don't want to, and i can easily merge in and out of people, threading here and there, without paying attention to all the comments and calls of shopkeepers wanting to sell me their products. i actually find it relaxing, i love the sound of arabic, and i can almost escape the people despite the hundreds that line the way. "

i arrived home just before christmas and it took awhile for me to re-adjust to the western world where carpet and doors and real beds and no sand is normal...

2006 has finished, 2007 has begun...