Planning Ahead Has Never Been my Forté

I was at the library picking up tax forms and I decided to take a look at their travel books. I figured since I'm supposed to be going to Cairo in Egypt in about a month that it was a good idea to start doing some research. I know, forever the procrastinator, but I've never been the best at planning ahead. Don't get me wrong. I DO know what I'm doing, but I don't always care to know EXACTLY what I doing before I do it. It's not really possible in the grand scheme of life to know what lays ahead of you anyway, so really, I'm just living life the way it was meant to be lived. But I digress....

I was at the public library downtown today and since it's Saturday, and therefore, free to park in the metered spots, I was taking my time. After taking two of each 1040 form and accompanying booklet on the table and a few various, hopefully useful, deduction schedule forms, I headed to the third floor of Faulk Central Library and found the travel section. What I found were a bookshelf full of outdated travel books. I'm pretty sure the Europe travel books were relatively up-to-date. (I would assume, although, I didn't look at all of them.) The books I was looking for were another story. I found one, and only one travel guide on the the whole Middle East dated 2001 and not one after that. It makes sense, somehow. I'm sure Sept. 11, 2001 made a lot of people curious about the Middle East in general. I would suspect that after that most people have decided to stay away out of fear.

Anyway, I found a Rough Guide to Egypt book dated 2003 and DK Egypt book dated 2001 with lots of color pictures in it and decided that I should start there. I checked out those two, as well an impulse check-out titled Travel in Africa with your Health Intact (or something like that) or as I would call it: How Not to Die of an Infectious Disease But Still Know Enough About All of the Possibilities to be Scared of it. At that point, I decided I should probably buy a ticket soon and emailed a travel agent at Flightcentre USA who's a friend of a friend to find out how to do it.

I haven't heard back from the travel agent yet and I haven't read any of the books, but I will soon enough. And I promise I'll put it all down here because, believe me, if I can help others make sense of the confusion that is traveling, I'll do what I can. It's a jungle out there, man! And I haven't even left yet...