He makes an Alabama proud. I guess we'll have to wait and see if it does any good.
How long does yellow potato salad from Wal-Mart remain edible and/or delicious? Wade and I are bravely venturing to find out. So far we're rounding out Day 12, and we're still a go for edible and delicious.
This is why they called her Hot Legs Franny in college.
In celebration of Wade's Golden Birthday yesterday -- he turned 28 -- enjoy some photos of Mr. Pie doing what he does best: being awesome. These pictures were taken by my awesome dad a few weeks ago. Click on each photo to enjoy the full scope of awesome.
I love you, Sweet Boy.
It looks like I'm going to be working through lunch, so you'll have to wait to hear more about our trip.
So here's a quick reprieve from the travelogue and a divulgence of my newest FAVORITE thing ever.
Aunt Angelia turned my obsessive-compulsive-prone attention to FreeRice.com, a site with game-like quizzes that test and hone your vocabulary, geography knowledge and even your artistic eye.
And, supposedly, for every correct answer that you input, the sponsors of the site will donate 10 grains of rice through the UN to HUNGRY CHILDREN EVERYWHERE!
Full disclosure: I should come clean that I'm not that interested in ending world hunger or the people that are on a mission to do so. Just call me a bad person if you want. I somehow found myself as the "public relations representative" for the Auburn University End World Hunger Today Right Now committee. I attended about four meetings before essentially disappearing because I was tired of hour-long rants about people being hungry. Yeah. Just talking about it. —Because doing it is impossible.—
But I'm am very much a fan of games, especially the ones that make you feel alternately brilliant then dumb for knowing the definition of "flittermouse" and then failing to know what an "embonpoint" is.
Here are the different subjects in which you can assess your knowledge:
After our jaunt in Petra, we parted ways with Brittany and flew to Lebanon. We met up with our lovely friends, Spot and Pimily, whom we hadn't seen in about 1.5 year but whom we immediately recognized in the airport because of the sign they held up for our benefit, which said, "Bags, Ho."
We were relieved — to have reprieve from our taxi-driver travails, to be in the company of Arabic speakers and to be able to wash our stinky clothing.
Cot & Lem took us to their home, a small apartment in a neighborhood that had children playing in the street and butchers gutting sheep, also in the street.
Their electricity went out several times, and despite the constant cloud of mosquitoes, we opened the windows as we slept. In the choice of drowning in a pool of sweat or being eaten alive by mosquitoes during the night, we chose the latter.
That's why, as you'll see, Erin woke up the first morning with her eye fused shut and her face swollen. When the swelling came down a bit, we could see that the culprit had not been Flemily's fist in the middle of the night, but a mosquito that had bitten Erin's eyelid.
So if you think she's being fresh and winking at you in some of the following photos, I'm sorry to have to dash that thought to shreds.
Because of the elections that weekend, we had to fit our big sightseeing trips into the first few days. First we went to Baalbek, an enormous and well-preserved complex of temples constructed for Jupiter (Zeus), Venus (Aphrodite), Mercury and Bacchus. The area is thus named in pre-Roman times by the Phoenicians for their god Baal, who is mentioned many times in the Old Testament (here is a great example).
We may get older, and we may move away to different places, but we're still as silly as we were 20 years ago.
Take a moment and marvel at how talented my husband is. Also, to the right is Herculean Erin, who does not let a vision-impairing mosquito bite keep her at home.
The Lebanese countryside. One of the key ways that Lebanon differs from Egypt and Jordan is its greenness. We saw grass in Lebanon! I wanted to rub my face in it. At this point, we had either pulled over to take in the verdant beauty or I'd forced Spock to pull over because I felt pukey from his crazy driving.
The next day we took another long, winding drive to see the Lebanese cedars of Biblical fame. It was a nice, cool escape from the hot, arid climate we'd experienced thus far in our journey. The cedars, however, are suffering in Lebanon. They've been "exploited" to the point that there are few cedar forests in the country, despite the cedar being the national symbol, right smack dab on their flag.
So what do we do? Support the exploitation of cedars by purchasing some cedar souvenirs! A girl in the shop we went to personalized a wood carving and ornament we bought by writing Bible verses upon the fragrant wood with a smoldering, red-hot thingamajig.
Erin, Flem and I found Word Warp to be a necessary diversion in almost every spare moment. Erin, who brought her iPhone over on the trip, found herself constantly having to charge it because of our shared obsession (Wade and I have since downloaded the game to his iPod Touch and play it nightly).
Guess who's another year older today? That's right...the one and only Mrs. Pettus Pie. Wow, I can't believe that this is already your third birthday since we've been married. You're such an incredible woman and I'm truly blessed to have you as my wife and companion. I look forward to spending many more birthdays together with you.
I wanted to post one of the hundreds of adorable childhood pictures that I've seen of you, but unfortunately I couldn't find any of them on our computer. Oh well, I figured the next best thing would be an adorable picture of you and your favorite daughter...from her childhood.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!
Staffless, Mosesless and dry-landless, we pilgrims progressed our way across the Red Sea to Jordan by ferry. Immediately we were struck by how much the country contrasted with Egypt. The streets were clean! Trash cans existed! Drivers used lane markings! Cops pulled over speeders! (But, to our bafflement, there were speed bumps in the middle of the highways.) The Jordanians, whose manners shone against the baseness of the Egyptians we'd encountered, spoke better English and seemed to value their country's visitors.
Early the next morning, we hit the trail to Petra. It starts with a long, pleasant stroll down the Siq, the paved road to the city, which meanders through a sandstone canyon that an earthquake carved out thousands of years ago.
It's absolutely lovely in the morning light. Along the way are tombs and shrines carved into the walls. The Nabateans, who built Petra about 500+ years before Christ, made the city into an artificial oasis. We saw the channels they had running along the entire Siq that were used to funnel water from their dams, aqueducts and Ain Musa, the Spring of Moses (where they say Moses struck the rock, instead of speaking to it, to bring forth water for the Israelites).
The Treasury is the most elaborately carved structure in Petra, and it's the first you meet. The ornate facade was used in the third Indiana Jones movie, but the building has little more inside that a couple of open rooms, and it was used as a royal tomb. Funny story: Centuries after Petra was abandoned by the city folk, the bedouins developed their own folklore about the significance of the structures. They believed that the urn at the top of the temple, which is carved out of the sandstone just like the rest of the Treasury, held a secret treasure. Their story went like this: When Pharaoh was chasing the Israelites throught the desert during their Exodus, he was weighed down by all the treasure he was carrying. So he magically created the Treasury facade with the urn on top to keep his jewelry safe while he was on the run. The Bedouins fired guns at the urn, hoping to break it open, and there are now bulletholes all over the top of the temple. (Silly Bedouins ... Treasure is for pharaohs.)
We didn't have a tour guide for our day in Petra, but we did have my trusty "Rough Guide to Jordan," with its beautiful, detailed descriptions of each spot in Petra. (I highly recommend this series of travel books if you're the reader type.) Erin, who was always chosen to read aloud in 8th grade history, much to my jealous annoyance, was commissioned to read to us about the urn lore, the Nabateans and the precise color of Petra, which Agatha Christie described as the color of raw beef. 
Look who's happy to be in Petra!
The city. The way was dotted with tombs. The Nabateans also built for themselves an 8,000-seat amphitheater. They were a classy people.
They say that reading takes you places. But there are times when it just helps you know what the heck you're looking at when you are already at those places. (This is another big tomb. Up top, we found an echo room, in which Erin and I amused ourselves singing middle school Bible class songs in rounds. The "Horse and Rider," anyone?) 
Wade was absolutely ecstatic about the number of lizards we came across in Jordan and Lebanon. He'd scamper over the rocks toward them, all the while telling us to hush and not scare them away.
The series of photos that this picture went with had Wade going from posing beside the column, to acting like Samson between them, to climbing all over them like a monkey. Go figure.
This is the seemingly endless path up to the Monastery, the final feature at the pinnacle of Petra. Each step promises a quick end to the hike, but then you turn a corner and see countless more steps looming ahead. We had been offered donkeys at the beginning of the hike to the Monastery, but, jaded by our time in Egypt, we ignored the donkeymen. They shook their heads and said it was a long, hot hike, but we'd heard that before. Well, they weren't kidding. It was GRUELING! And with only hot bottled water to drink, Erin and I decided that we're going to return to Jordan someday and set up snow cone stands all along the way and make a bundle.
Wade and Brittany are triumphant at the top of our tedious climb. Wade was feeling so fine he even bought me a $3 Coke. The whole way back down, which seemingly went by in two minutes, we puzzled over why we hadn't heeded the donkeymen at the bottom like the smart, happy, donkey-straddling travelers who passed us the opposite way.If it weren't for the sneak peek a couple days ago, you might think we traveled all the way to Cairo and didn't see the Great Pyramids of Giza. Not so, my friends! The Sphinx and the Pyramids have always been at the top of my list of things to see before I die.
Here's where you'll learn a little something about my wiles as a itinerizer: Not only did I have us staying in $9-a-person hostels in Egypt and Jordan, but I slyly scheduled our trip to Luxor to be our hotel and transportation for two nights in a row.
So after Luxor, we caught our dingy sleeper train back to Cairo. We arrived too late to get tickets to go inside the pyramids, but after how marvelous the tombs in the Valley of the Kings turned out to be, we figured the inside of the pyramids would be a letdown.
Here we are making friends with the Sphinx. As you can see, Erin and Wade are a lot more forward (and peculiar) in their friendship-making efforts. (click to enlarge, of course.) 
Sphinxy, Wade and I sat down for a quiet reflection of our lifelong journeys. Wade and I were finished thinking a lot sooner than Sphinxy, so we left him there for a bit more time contemplating.
Admiring the patches of blue sky near the base of the middle pyramid, the Pyramid of Khafre. It's 471 feet tall and is the only one of the pyramids with some of its original granite casing, the bit at the top. (Word on the street is that the Sphinx was carved in the likeness of Khafre, who reigned 2,500 years BC.) This picture is quite the optical illusion because it makes the pyramid seem tiny. Trust me, we and the bird were quite a ways off.
Let's play a little game of Where's Brittany? Spoiler — She's three blocks up, in the blue. Each of the limestone blocks at the bottom weighs more than 2 tons, and they gradually get smaller on the way up. We would have kept climbing up if it weren't for the guard eyeing us nearby.
Always time for a Coke. Egyptian peddlers — whether they're hawking taxi rides or photo opps with themselves — are tenacious and a bit frantic. They'll yell at you and follow you for a hundred yards before they finally give up and zero in on a new victim. They'll say, "Where you from?" Where you going?" "How can I help you?" "You're my brother!" "I give you special Egyptian price!" and if you pay them any attention at all, even to tell them no, they take that as encouragement to harass you some more. The older gentleman who gave us this Coke was the white-robed, sandy type, sitting near the pyramid and yelling at us for several minutes. We decided to run over and see what he had, and before we could get a word out, he popped open this Coke, handed it over and demanded money.
We took an (unsurprisingly) uncomfortable night bus to the tiny town of Nuweiba, which is located on the righthand arm of the Red Sea. We bought our ferry tickets and then skipped joyfully toward the beach near the ferry port. We were struck with dismay when we came up upon a massive trash heap with miry sand that looked like camel poop. Our much-anticipated day at the Red Sea was RUINED. We walked back to town and luckily found someone willing to take us to a real beach, several miles away, with cleaner water and sand. The above photo shows what we found: a practically desolate sandy stretch flecked with empty huts (for campers) and water more beautiful than my words or photography can portray.
We were just happy to have a few hours away from the locals.
The waves look tame in all the photos we took, but they were the real, serious, knock-you-down-and-laugh-at-you type of waves. I kept wishing I could have 5 minutes to be there and see the Israelites crossing between the very virulent waters that were smacking me around and going up my nose.
Before we left, Wade, Erin and I were aware that the showers would be sparse and the sun would be hot as we hostel-hopped from city to city.
I told them I'd heard that in the Middle East, the "air is full of spices," so why oughtn't we let our own bodily spices mingle with those of the Egyptians?
Let me assure you, our aroma certainly titillated the senses.
I thought I could get in a whole country per post, but there is just too much to relay.
So today, I give you "Egypt: Days One and Two."
I can't promise my descriptions will be concise, but I'll try to hit all the major memories that will go with me till the grave, or Alzheimer's, whichever hits first.
After a rough night trying to find the our hostel and being harshly introduced to the mannerless barking of the Egyptian taxi drivers, we spent our first morning in Cairo at Khan al-Khalili. It's a famously huge bazaar in the city's Muslim district. Available merchandise ranged from spices in crates to belly-dancing costumes. Erin and I bought paintings on "certified real" papyrus. I'd done a little research before our trip and learned that papyrus, an endangered plant in Egypt, is exceedingly rare, and that any artwork for sale on "papyrus" would most likely just be on banana leaves. 
Then we drove over to the Citadel, still in the Muslim district, which was built in the 1100s to protect you-know-who from the Crusaders. We spent some time gallivanting around barefoot in our first and only visit to a mosque, the Mosque of Muhammad Ali.
We checked out Coptic Cairo, the city's Christian district, where we went into some weird underground room beneath a monastery where a bunch of people were chanting and chaining up small children. (I wish I was kidding, but I'm completely serious. It all had to do with this guy.)
That night we took the sleeper train to Luxor and woke up beneath these colossal beauties. They're 60 feet high and 3,400 years old. A funny story about these statues — for centuries they were the destination of Roman pilgrimages, even the emperors, because the one on the right mysteriously sang at dawn. It was actually just the wind passing through a crack caused by an earthquake. The singing stopped when some Roman decided to "fix" the statue, which is why the structure looks ganked up compared to its pal on the left. (Side note: I had to photoshop Wade's eyes open in this picture. Marvel if you'd like.)
We also visited Hapshesut's temple, or embalming station. It's an enormous building that took decades to build and was only used for a few days. Hapshetsut, Egypt's only female pharaoh, started construction on the building after she assumed power, and she was embalmed there after death. The vertical statues in the photo on the left are her likenesses (she's famous for having donned a horse-hair beard glued to her chin so as to be taken seriously.) In the photo on the right, Wade, Al-Adin, and a Gilligan-behatted Japanese tourist stand in front of some of the faded relief artwork on the temple walls inside. (We weren't allowed to take pictures inside the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, but just imagine this here but with more vivid colors and the occasional face-scratch-out, courtesy of the Muslims.)
Later that afternoon, we enjoyed the lusher side of Luxor by taking a faluka ride down the Nile to the plantations on Banana Island.
Wade and Brittany take their complimentary tea shots. Middle Easterners LOVE their tea, and they love it with lots of sugar, but for some reason, they only want it in small doses.
We frolicked through the banana fields and gorged ourselves on miniature nanners.
Toasting the evening was what our new friend, Rajad, called "horse wrestling." The villagers on Banana Island were celebrating some dead guy (martyr) they liked, so they took to running their horses up and down and waving canes in the air. A small horde of rabid Egyptian boys swarmed around us, as we were the only white people around, and eyed our pockets. I had my first Egyptian butt-groping, and I was not pleased.
