The team at Leap Local spent 17-hour days/nights for weeks developing Leap’s new website, and What on Earth?, our new travel magazine. This magazine isn’t a glossy brochure for fantasy and unrealistic dream trips, but revels in the hilarious, gritty, heart wrenching, stupid, maddening, culture clashing, wonderful adventures, and misadventures of travel. The launch issue contains the winning local guides & services and the winning travel stories from our competitions. And it has my own story, “Thou Shalt Not Snore”, about a diabolical night in Jordan, in the WTF (weird travel files) section of the magazine.

Yes, I’ve broken my own cycling record, even. I think there are glaciers that can move faster than me. I achieved a blistering speed (blisters to my bum that is) of 3.8 kilometres per hour climbing an off road track to a high plateau above Petra, while accompanied by one of Jordan’s fastest men, Anas, my mountain bike guide. I’m sure he regretted his words, “we have all day.” 

I’m pretty sure Raslan (Jordanian cycling champion and guide) had no idea how slow he could go until Terhaal (a Jordanian adventure tour operator) assigned him to me. Raslan now can boast a 4.7 kilometre per hour ascent outside Madaba and another near the Dead Sea. It’s tough to stay upright when you’re going that slow. I hope Jordan appreciates how I’ve helped train Raslan for his next event.

I had the massive honour of being asked to give a cover quote for the soon-to-be-released book, Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls. I was given a sneak peek of the cover art (still a work in progress) today and read my praise for this politically incorrect work of comic genius and thought, “It’s probably a good thing that Gary’s new book isn’t coming out until after my trip to the Middle East, as I wouldn’t want to have such an infamous association at a time when I’m going to be smuggling my grandmother’s remains while using a passport that has been red flagged by Canadian Immigration.”  

Every couple of weeks, sometimes months, I remember to make the journey to my mail box, which due to rural-living and a very long driveway is a couple of kilometers out of my way. I went today and found inside a very heavy duty duffle bag that KE Adventures had shipped from the UK to Canada for my upcoming Dead Sea to Red Sea mountain bike trip across Jordan. The bag is so big that it can hold 2,303 falafels (you can calculate this by using the falafel formula - first you find the volume of the falafel - if the falafel is 4 cm in diameter by using V = 4/3 pi r cubed, you find the volume of the falafel to be .000033 meters cubed. The bag is .076 meters cubed based upon LxWxH. Then divide the volume of a single falafel into the volume of the bag. The answer is 2,303 squished falafels.). I don’t know how to figure this out without squishing them.