- Introduction -

It started when Troy took a trip to Turkey. Through some manner of Internet chat, Troy met a girl who lived in Istanbul and, being Troy, he went there to meet her in person. After a week of spending time with this woman and seeing the area, Troy was hooked. Probably on the girl, but he was much more hooked on travel.

With his usual Troy diligence, he managed to track down some amazingly cheap airline tickets and organized a trip to Europe, to which he invited me and our friend Rob, who had moved out to Los Angeles one year previous. Rob, of course, was in. I, of course, turned him down. Much as I would have liked, I did not have the vacation time to spare. Thus, with that concluded, we go to Delta, Ohio.

Where, you ask yourselves is Delta, Ohio? Well, Delta, Ohio is located about twenty miles west of Toledo, Ohio, a made famous by John Denver’s song saying that he "spent a week in Toledo one night." It is not so much a city as an outpost of civilization. And twenty miles west of Toledo is well beyond its outskirts. To give you an idea of Delta, Ohio, one must imagine the most remote place on earth that could be thought possible. The sort of place that people describe as being, "In the middle of nowhere." These descriptions are invariably lies, of course, because in order for someplace to be in the middle of nowhere, it would have to be in the middle of Delta. The question you should now be asking is, then what were you doing there? The answer is that I was having a very bad day at work.

I suppose I need to explain a few things before I can describe how I ended up there. I used to work for a telecommunications company in a very strange capacity, in that nobody knew what I did. I worked at that job for over four years and I never successfully described to people the responsibilities of my job, mostly because I never figured out what they were. However, everybody seemed to think my job was important, which was, presumably, why they kept paying me for so long.

Every so my job sent me someplace important to do something that people also thought was important, though usually turned out to be pretty mundane in execution. Thus, I ended up in Delta, Ohio unplugging and replugging cables at one o’clock in the morning while people back in Columbus, Ohio (where I actually live) agreed that I unplugged and replugged the cables properly. Tedious? I was in hell.

Anyway, while performing the sort of work that I needn’t have done, had there not been a trained monkey shortage at the time, I decided, "I need a vacation or I will kill myself." It was then I remembered that Troy and Rob were going to Europe, and I figured out that I had more vacation time that I had originally calculated, and I decided I didn’t care how much it cost, I would make a way to pay for it. Thus, the next day, I asked Troy and Rob if I was still invited, booked a ticket, requested vacation time and got myself ready to meet my friends for nine days of their fourteen day trip to another continent.