Testy Testy

This is a test blog for the email notification service that I attempted to set up. Hope it works. And I should also mention that I won't be bringing my phone with me on this trip. If you want to have a dialogue with me at some point over the next six weeks, anyone should be able to post comments on this site, or you can email my gmail account. Just in case internet action don't work, I am going to pass along some Turkish phone numbers to my brother, my sister, my dad, my roommate dave, and my ma. If there is an emergency you should be able to reach me thru them.

Side Note: This trip has already gotten off to an auspicious start and I haven't even left town yet. Last nite I met up with one of my travel companions to discuss logistics and have a couple cocktails to celebrate the end of the semester. We met up at the Front Porch in Lodo. It was flip a coin nite, so every time we order a round the bartender flips a coin, and if you call it right the drinks are on the house. Somehow we never lost a flip. It was magical. And it got to the point where we were ordering the craziest drinks in the house because we knew we were going to win the flip. But that is when things began to spiral out of control. We lost count of how many drinks we had been served and how much of what kind of liquor we were pouring into our bellies. And as my Shoffner clan likes to say, I do believe we were over-served.

After a couple of hours of winning coin tosses and talking about irrelevant things like platform diving and flip flops instead of travel logistics, we attempted to vacate the premises. I gathered my wits and headed for the door. Katie, my soon-to-be travel companion, did not follow me because she could not find her purse. Uh-Oh. We search every nook and cranny in the bar to no avail. The purse was stolen.

An excellent beginning to our trip, me thinks. We haven't even left the country yet and we already had a purse stolen. Well, I suppose that is one less thing we'll have to worry about while we're traveling. Can't get your purse stolen on the road if it was already stolen at home. So we got that going for us...which is nice.

Onward and Upward!