This blog will be officially closed after this posting......

Hard to believe it's been almost six weeks since I started it in the middle of the Australian winter. Thanks to all who've commented or emailed me concerning my journey. For those who've followed this odessy I've eaten food that was good but probably best left unknown. I did find out what it was that still had the skeleton inside--it was a fried spider. Actually it wasn't bad and we ate more of them later as snacks--kinda like popcorn. I also ate a noodle soup ladled out of a huge pot with a sheep's head boiling in it and tried pickled duck's feet. On a more conventional level, I tried my first Peiking Duck and lots of other traditional Australian, Thai and Chinese foods.

I've met some interesting and unusual people on this trip. We stumbled across an Old Salt on Melbourne Bay who opened a World War II battleship and gave us an impromptu tour, I watched drunken Australians chasing sheep through a shopping mall, jogged through a human zoo of weirdos on the Pattaya Beach sidewalk, and had to block the door to keep a Buddhist monk out of my room around midnight in Xian.

Some of the things I've seen include the beautiful city of Canberra, the Port of Melbourne, Pattaya Beach, the Forbidden City and Temple of Heaven, Tiananmen Square, the Great Wall of China and the Terracotta Warriors of Xian as well as the unbelievable skyline of Hong Kong.

If this last posting seems to be rambling, it is. I just wanted you to experience some of the things that makes my job and these overseas trips so meaningful to me. I probably won't do this again. Unfortunately, the security issues of carrying a computer (airport and hotel issues), the damage that occurs (I've cracked the hinges on my laptop), and the cost of Internet service in some hotels makes maintaining a travel blog a headache on many days.

Again, thanks to all who followed me and shared this experience. See you in a couple of days.....

Gary