A friend asked me recently how I decide where to go on vacation?  From the beginning, I’d always enjoyed social studies and history class in school, but my freshmen year of high school when I took Western Civilizations with Dr. Dan Kelly, I fell in love with history.  I knew then that I wanted to teach history at the college level and see the pyramids.  I’m a graduate school dropout so teaching history never came to fruition.  I left the PhD program in Early Modern European History with a focus in gender and sexuality almost as soon as I started.  But less than a year after leaving graduate school, I was in Egypt  at the pyramids with Matt.   Our time in Egypt opened the world up.

It was two years after September 11^th and our families were pretty worried about our safety.  I was concerned.  Egypt seemed like a scary, intimidating place from back home, but once there it wasn’t.  I was more afraid driving on the skinny, one lane, cliff-edge roads of the Dingle peninsula in Ireland than I was in Egypt.  That didn’t […]