Once Upon A Time in (Central) America...

Twin Sons of Different Mothers
And so began our journey.

About a year ago fellow international recruiters, Jason Combs of Savannah College of Art and Design and Hani Morsi of American University of Cairo (Egypt, not Illinois) were sitting around the pool at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Muscat, Oman. I don't remember exactly what we were talking about, but somehow we cooked up the idea of a trip together through Central America. We would explore countries from the Caribbean to the blue Pacific.

Hani is a young man who doesn't make a lot of money by American standards. (He ain't gettin' rich by Egyptian standards either, but his day will come.) To help him make his decision I offered to pay his airfare if he could cover everything else. Jason is an accomplished world traveler. Both their blogs are linked to this one.

We agreed in general to do it the following June. Later Jason e-mailed a potential itinerary to me using the popular Google Earth (Did you know there are only 100,000 Google Earth users to date?)

Plans were made, multiple E-mails were exchanged, visas were acquired (for Hani, since he's not an American). As it turned out Hani couldn't make the trip. It was much more difficult and expensive for him to get the visas than we originally thought, plus he felt uncomfortable accepting my offer. I expect he and I will hook up next year in countries easier for him to get into. Maybe Northern Africa, the Middle East or Eastern Europe.

After that I talked my son Mick into joining the fray. He's been working on St. John, US Virgin Islands, in an Archeology office. He's to begin work on Master of Archeology at the University of South Carolina in August. I offered to sweeten the pot for his birthday so he could afford it. Last year he and I had visited Costa Rica in June. My hope is to do something like this every year for as long as we can. That means until he settles down with a family or my full-blown senility sets in. He's betting on the senility. Me too.

So it was Mick, Jason and me. Jason is about 6'3", Mick about 4'6". Other than that they could have passed for brothers.