There's no place like home

We slept in our own bed last night, for the first time in 13 months of travel around the world since we left our home in San Francisco in June 2007 .

Since we got back to the USA in June 2008 we've driven almost 10,000 miles across North America and back, through 30 states of the USA and 4 Canadian provinces, for a total of 28 countries and 80,000 miles in our entire trip.

We changed our originally planned route somewhat and ended up visiting parts of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, the Vatican, Syria, Turkey, Greece, Qatar, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Yemen, Egypt, Eritea, China (Hong Kong SAR), Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Japan, the USA, and Canada.

Just as themes had emerged in the overseas portion of our journey (the legacy of the Ottoman empire and the Crusades in many places we visited; rising prices of food and to a lesser extent energy; the growing role of China and the European Union in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; the decline of the US dollar; the decline of US hegemony or "leadership" in every aspect except military and cultural; the shift from geographically separated First and Thirds Worlds, or global North and South, to a world in which Northern and Southern wealth and ways of living coexist, albeit unstably, within the same countries), so there were themes to our North American road trip (friends and relatives our age facing issues of parenting teenagers, caring for increasingly infirm parents, and going through midlife crises and in some cases divorces).

It's good to be home, but there's a lot for me to do both in my writing (look for major updates to this Web site) and in my work for the Identity Project .

[Follow-up: Some places I recommend from my trip.]

Another round of illegal USA travel controls

Recently, while I've been travelling, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) of the USA Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a press release announcing new, illegal, identity verification procedures for travellers at airports in the USA, while the DHS Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division has published a formal proposal for a new, illegal, Electronic System for Travel Authorization for visitors to the USA. See my comments on both proposals in the linked articles in the Identity Project blog.

[Update, 27 July 2008: New evidence confirms the illegality of the TSA's new identity verification procedures.]