Bill-on-the-Hill

Greetings, folks. I'll be starting to contribute content-oriented blogstuff in a day or two, starting with multiple reports on a mega-vacation to hike the Italian volcanoes (Vesuvius, Etna, Stromboli, etc.) First, though, a brief note about myself, stressing the "travel" parts of my identity:

I'm a 54-year-old nuclear physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, married with two sons in college. I've had a great deal of professional travel to countries of the former Soviet Union, most of it either to Moscow or to places seriously far out in the boonies -- if you can find Seversk and Snezhinsk on a map without cheating, raise your hand, not many hands up out there. Most of that was (mercifully) long enough ago that I don't have much to say about those places from a Wikitravel point of view; they've probably advanced somewhat in terms of creature comfort since I was there, which is good because they had a lot of advancing to do...

On the "fun" side of travel, I incline toward the Great Outdoors, and the first two blog subjects to follow this intro will both deal with outdoors-oriented trips. (Side note: WikiOutdoors, http://www.wikioutdoors.com/Main_Page , is an embryonic wiki for outdoors activities that is cooperating with Wikitravel and needs some help getting going. I contribute lots of stuff there; if you hike/bike/ski/bird/etc., please consider doing likewise.) The serious mountaineering, caving, and so on is a few years, and more pounds, in my past, but we still do family trips to some decidedly out-of-the-way outdoors destinations, which will provide blog fodder for ages to come, if all goes well. Hiking into the craters of active volcanoes ... cycling the Scottish Highlands ... looking for archaeological sites, one of which is named for my mother-in-law (seriously) ... you get the idea. (Of course, when doing these trips, we also enjoy eating well, which is where some of those pounds, if not the years, come from!...)

Amusing non-travel web site du jour: http://www.thesuperheroquiz.com/ , on which I type out as The Incredible Hulk -- supposedly an analysis of personality type, but it's also a commentary on my physique and skin tone!

More to follow ...