Did I tell you about the time I was in Egypt?

This picture is in front of the Pyramids in Giza. 1961.

Try to remember back when you were just a tyke. Before school age when you were totally committed to just having a good time, exploring life in general EVERYTHING was new. The whole world is a place of wonder and learning is a natural progression of your day. How fortunate was I to be given an opportunity to not only live day to day learning new things, but to be given the experience of other cultures.
My dad was an engineer for Morrison Knudsen. Although lately we have re-assessed our thoughts on his career and think he really was a CIA operative. He did do James-Bondy things, like travel to exotic places at short notice, his passport - if that was his real passport - had pull-out pages with stamps and visa's from every corner of the globe(even color-coded by continent). He also had the demeanor of someone who had to wrestle with his internal demons while putting on a completely different external persona. He was unapproachable and really didn't do the parent thing too well.
Which made my mom a saint.

One day, at Sand Camp...



My mom re-defined a "stay-at-home mom". My dad provided us the opportunity to travel all over the world and she made sure the opportunity wasn't squandered. By the time I was 10 we had lived in Iran for 3 years, Australia for a year and Singapore for a year. We traveled and visited such places as London, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpour, Sidney and Perth. So often we would befriend other families of engineers who would just stay where they were put and not explore or experience the culture, then they would complain how miserable the place was that they were. Their loss, a squandered opportunity. Stay-at-home wasn't really in her vocabulary.
You can learn stuff in books, or you can live it. My mom was one who insisted that we experience all that the culture had to offer, wherever we lived or visited. The education my sister, brother and I had first-hand was incredible. It shaped us into who we are.
Memory being what it is, much of what happened between birth and 10 is a blur. The stuff between birth and 3 was REALLY a blur, because they found out I was far-sighted at 3, I got glasses and suddenly the world for me came in to focus. Next post... living in Iran.