An Unlikely Explorer Update!

Hello all!

It's only a day and few hours to the New Year and I'm sitting in a living room in New York. The living room is familiar and so is the family that fills it but this year matt is adding his considerable charm and adorable face to the mix. It's been a crazy christmas this year. We kept waiting for Matt to do a lot of christmas-y things and so it didn't feel like christmas until he landed on the 23rd. Since then it's been food and smiles and board games and barely any sleep and an awful amount of wrapping paper piling up in corners.

Even with our World Heritage Site dreams, life (and travel) wouldn't be worth it if we restricted ourselves to only trips to exotic locales. Even though we are close to New York City there won't be any time or chance to visit. Sometimes it's about family and relaxing. This trip it's been all about Matthew learning about my life and meeting my family (or, really, what's left of it). It's been lovely showing Matt the country outside of the cities and showing him how people really live here. My favorite thing is that he keeps commenting on how beautiful this country is. It's taken his new eyes for me to find the beauty in something that I've considered normal in my life.  So we're going to enjoy our time with American diners and movie theaters and American football. Besides, Matt still has time here when we get home and Washington D.C. is right on my doorstep.

I hope everyone has had an amazing holiday and that your New Year celebrations are fabulous and filled with hope for 2013. I'll be back with more travel stories next year!

Merry Christmas Everyone!!! <3

T xx

I Am Prone To Distraction

Hello all!

I feel awful.

I'm sitting here, late at night, making lists of all the things that need to be done before Christmas and I realized that it has been absolutely FOREVER since I wrote anything of any substance. I certainly haven't updated here.

I am a ball of guilt.

In better news, the Unlikely Explorers better half will be in the States for Christmas so there will be more to write about soon! However, it's unlikely I'll have time to post before the New Year

So, keeping that in mind, I figured we should do a quick recap of the wonderful in interesting things that happened for UNESCO World Heritage Sites (and us!) this year...

1) This year the World Heritage Convention celebrated it's 40th Anniversary! The World Heritage Convention was adopted in the November of 1972. Since then it's been responsible for identification, protection and conservation of natural and cultural sites worldwide. <- While that may sound a bit boring all written out, just think of all the beautiful places that would have been (and are under threat of being) destroyed.

2) During this banner year for UNESCO they have added 26 new sites making the current total 962!

3) The new inscriptions includes the first Palestinian World Heritage Site. For those of you who aren't completely aware of why this is huge- it's a step forward for any part of the UN to acknowledge Palestine as it's own independent state.

And for us...

The Unlikely Explorer blog was started! Matt and I got our first taste of (kind of) living together and traveling together which was amazing.


Those are our highlights! I know it's a short list but hopefully as the years pass the lists of amazing things that have happened will keep on growing!


To all my Jewish friends, Happy (end of) Chanukah!
To all my Pagan friends, have a lovely Yule!
Finally, to all of my Christmas lovers (Christian, Agnostic and ahem Atheist alike), Merry Christmas!!!

And to everyone ~ HAPPY NEW YEAR!!~

I hope to see you all in 2013 <3

Txx