Countdown Day 3

Countdown Day 3

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Mar. 17th, 2006 at 6:27 PM

This is my first entry into this journal. I don’t usually keep a journal but I thought that a trip like this needs to be archived, not to mention I wanted to share my experiences with those that I know. What trip you might ask? Well, in somewhere in February I was asked by my boss if I would be interested in going to present at a workshop in Saudi Arabia. They initially asked him, but since he had been already to Saudi Arabia last year he passed the opportunity onto me. Thanks Tom!

The title of the conference is called Learning and Technology: Bridging the Digital Divide (For More info: Effat College). I thought this is rather interesting considering that America has a similar issue between the have’s and the have’s not. Anyway, the conference coordinators were rather accommodating letting me pick from a range of topics they wanted to cover, not to mention that they were picking up the tab for the trip. I choose to do two workshops 1) Course Websites and Learning Management Tools; and 2) Creating Effective Tutorials with Multimedia. While I was making my travel arrangements online I noticed that there were some rather interesting locations where I would have to switch planes. I inquired if they would not mind if I made some stopovers while in route to my final destination and they were OK with it. So off I went spending several hours search and manipulating dates and locations to finally get my itinerary just right. Well sort of right. I am getting to the main destination spots I wanted, but I have some early flights I will have to take. My flight pattern is

Day	From	To	Plane
1	Roanoke, VA USA	Chicago, IL USA	Canadair Regional Jet
1-2	Chicago, IL USA	London, England	Boeing 777
3	London, England	Milan, Italy
3	Milan, Italy	Cairo, Egypt
7	Cairo, Egypt	Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
12	Jeddah, Saudi Arabia	Frankfurt, Germany
12	Frankfurt, Germany	Charlotte, NC USA	Airbus A330
12	Charlotte, NC, USA	Roanoke, VA USA
Note: I added these links just because I thought it was cool that there was a website that provided a seat map of the plane. Not all the airlines that I will be traveling on had these seat maps available.

A total of 35 ½ hours up in the air. Whew! I hope they have some good in-flight movies. I at least have some reading material. The books I plan to read during my travels are The Egyptian by Arthur Phillips, The Closers by Michael Connelly, and The Millionaires by Brad Meltzer (can't say that they are the most recently released books just some I picked up while browsing Barnes and Noble).

Let me not forget the infamous dissertation that I plan to bring to a close when I return. I already defended the first three chapters so I do not have too much more to do, but I also do not have a lot of time to finish the last two chapters. Although this trip comes at somewhat a bad time I could not pass up this possibly once in a life time experience. This will be the first time I have actually traveled out of the country (I don’t really count Mexico or Canada). Anyway, I will have to make sure during my travel time sitting in the air that I do some brushing up on the literature in my field, re-reading chapters 1 through 3, and writing the skeleton for chapter 4. Well, I guess this is a good start to the journal. I will try to write some more tomorrow.

April 2009