Late one night while relaxing on the couch I caught the movie Hotel Rwanda on television by chance. I had never seen it before, although always having been keen to do so, and felt that this was the sign I needed to know that this trip was meant to be. It was surely a sign, […]
Visiting the Kigali Genocide Memorial
On our first morning together as a group in Rwanda we took a brief city tour before heading over to the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center. I knew it was a necessary stop on the trip, but I really had no desire to see once again how brutal one man can be towards another; my trip […]
Exploring Saqqara and the Step Pyramid of Djoser
I love seeing things in person that I feel are things that can be dubbed as “you only see in books.” I think that’s part of why I love traveling so much. I love to go places and actually see these things in person to know what it’s all about, opposed to just turning the […]
The Black Nile
I love shopping at used book sales – like the ones for libraries trying to clean off some of the shelves – because there are no shortage of good finds. Whether it is at a library sale, a warehouse liquidation, or some other random used book sale, I always seem to find good deals. And […]
Crossing the Heart of Africa
I slid Julian Smith’s book onto the shelf, just to the right of Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World. I had finished it, Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure, and stood before my bookshelf contemplating the story. It wasn’t what I had expected and thus I wasn’t quite sure […]
Bill Bryson’s African Diary
Several months ago, maybe even a year, I saw Bill Bryson’s African Diary on the shelf at the bookstore. I had wanted to read it for some time simply because Bill Bryson wrote it. I love his work and this was one of the outstanding books of his I had yet to read. Well, when […]

