The Tour's Next Leg

I've been home from Vietnam for twenty-one days, which means it's the perfect time to book the next leg of the GCW Tour. So today I bought tickets for the niece and I to head to Spain at the end of June. I wanted to take her to Europe, she wanted somewhere she could practice her Spanish, so Spain fit both of our requirements.

Most fortuitously, on Friday when I was talking with a friend who'd lived in Spain about my plans, she mentioned that it was sad I was leaving when I was, as the Festival of San Fermin -- i.e., the running of the bulls in Pamplona -- would start the next day. Naturally, I made some adjustments to the plan so that we'd be around to see that.* 

Of course the universe has to balance, so my good timing with respect to running bulls corresponded to bad timing with respect to Morocco. It turns out that Ramadan this year runs from before the earliest date we could leave to after the point where the high season -- and the hot season -- begins, so adding Morocco to this leg of the tour is going to be a little bit challenging as we'll have to work within the limitations of Ramadan (i.e., a fair portion of the country will be shut down from sunrise to sunset). But if I'm going to hit all seven continents before my time runs out, I can't really pass up this chance at Africa.** Hence, we'll make something work.

In any case, the next leg of the GCW Tour is now set. 


* Now I just have to figure out how to convince the niece to take Dave and run with the bulls, cause my running days are over and Dave with the bulls would a pretty awesome picture. (Dear Sib4 -- I'm kidding, though you have to agree it would be an awesome picture.) 
** I would, of course, still like to ride motorcycles past giraffes, but that seems slightly more ambitious and thus further out and thus a lot more prone to never happening if the cancer switches gears. So we'll take the sure thing, and if the long shot comes to pass, I'm happy to have the GCW Tour include two trips to Africa.