Travel--The Friday Five made for me

Songbird gives us this Friday Five:

Friday, January 22, 2010

Friday Five: Trains, Planes and Automobiles

By the time you're reading this, I'll be en route to a Great Big City to see my son in a play. I'll go by car and bus and train and no doubt cab and maybe even subway. Thus, our Friday Five.

1) What was the mode of transit for your last trip?
I'm in Cleveland for my oncology check up. (I expect it to go well). Came by plane.
2) Have you ever traveled by train?
Last summer I took an overnight train from Turpan to Dunhuang in western China. It was a hoot. Fortunately, we didn't have to share our compartment. The train folks would come by, asking for something and we would have no idea what they wanted. The train arrived about an hour earlier than we had been told and so we had to rush around getting dressed and getting our luggage together. Our destination was the last stop, so at least we didn't have to worry about missing the stop. The trip was through desolate (unbelieveably desolate) countryside. We saw military vehicles headed to Xinjiang province (where we had just come from) to suppress the "insurrection" and to make sure everyone knew that the Han Chinese were in charge.

3) Do you live in a place with public transit, and if so, do you use it? Memphis has no public transit to speak of. Just buses. When I was in the Bay area, I occasionally took the ferry or BART, but not often. When I lived in Cleveland, I often commuted to work on the Rapid Transit.

4) What's the most unusual vehicle in which you've ever traveled? Sooner or later on some trip I am pushed to get on some form of animal. I do not ride animals. I've been on an elephant and a camel and took a mule to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Not a vehicle, though. I've ridden in the back of a truck along a dirt track with pigs and chickens in Nicaragua for five hours. I've done several hot air balloon rides. I've flown a plane without throwing up (never soloed, though).

5) What's the next trip you're planning to take? Well, my next trip is to APCE next week. But then I have three trips planned for this year which I'm really excited about. Sometime in the summer, I'm planning to fly to Dubvornik Croatia, rent a car, travel to Montenegro, maybe Sarajevo, up the coast and then drop the car at Ljubjana. In the early fall, I'm planning a trip to Bhutan with a stop over in Bangkok. Then at Thanksgiving, I'm planning to go to Ethiopia. I'm planning to raft the Blue Nile (rafted the White in Jan 08 and survived), and see the rock churches in Lalibelia and the monasteries and other stuff in Axum. I'm hoping to get to one of the national parks to see the animals. I think my next goal is to white water raft on all the continents. I've done North America, Africa and Asia. I suppose white water in Antarctica might be a little difficult. I'm not sure there is white water in Australia either, though there is in New Zealand.