Posted on by tompellegrini

Miscellaneous Trips

Alaska

I had a chance to travel to Alaska once in the spring for a job interview with ARCO where I also got to drive a dog sled for a few miles on the Iditerod Trail. I didn’t want the job, but I couldn’t pass up my first chance to see Alaska.

I went again in the summer a few years later where we camped near the Gates of the Arctic which is a few hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. We had multiple days that far north where the sun didn’t go down.

The two planes landed on a riverbank and were going to come back for us in four days. We didn’t see a sign of any other people the whole time we were there. There was no radio or phone signals. We were truly on our own.
From one of the peaks of the two Gates of the Arctic mountains.

British Virgin Islands

Over the Christmas/New Year’s holidays one year 6 of us rented a 46 foot sailboat and spent a week sailing and scuba diving in the BVIs.

Guest house the first night
The crew
One of the places we tied the boat off and dived.

Egypt

I had a chance to go to Egypt in late December/early January one year. The two most interesting parts where were we bribed the Egyptian government to climb to the top of the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Cairo and then going on a camel dive in Sharm El-Sheik on the Red Sea.

The view from our apartment
Climbing up
The view from the top
Looking down at the Pyramid of Khafre
Preparing the camels
Leaving the dive site to go back

Cartagena

I had a chance to visit Cartagena, Colombia with a few friends in 2001. It was an amazing city!

Unfortunately the tools of the Spanish Inquisition made it to the New World
In an old colonial house that still had 17th century Spanish grafiti on the walls.
A small mud volcano near Cartagena
Floating in mud on the top of the volcano