For reasons way to complicated to explain, and sure to be an anticlimax if I do, my family has always said, "So long, chicken!" when we leave a place. Well, I'm leaving Assisi at 5:00 in the morning, and if all goes well I'll be in Ulaan Baatar, Republic of Mongolia, about 19 hours later.

What this means is, you may not hear from me until the end of August. I'll try to get online for the first few days at the hotel in the city; once we're out in the countryside, though, that's the end of that. And no photos. I'm sorry I haven't been able to send you more photos on this trip, but I tried a number of times to download tsome and though the connection was up to it sometimes, more often it just wasn't.

So I'll tell you more about Italy, and all about Mongolia, with visual aids, when I get back. Meanwhile, I leave you, as I usually do when I go on a big trip, with the words of traveler Peter Fleming, as he headed into Western China: "He who starts on a ride of two or three thousand miles may experience, at the moment of departure, a variety of emotions. He may feel excited, sentimental, anxious, carefree, heroic, roistering, picaresque, introspective, or practically anything else; but above all he must and will feel a fool."