As a history/archaeology enthusiast, I took college history courses and visited ancient civilization sites. I would rather read a history book than a novel.
My interest in archaeology started when I was 14. A farmer near Champagnolle Creek in Calhoun County showed me an arrowhead he had found in his cotton field.
That arrowhead hooked me. It was my first foray into arrowhead hunting, which mushroomed into weekends with my arrowhead hunting partner John Henry Peppers. We spent hours in dozens of plowed fields near the creeks and Ouachita River and found a lot of arrowheads.
Several decades later I figured out that the Indigenous people who left these arrowheads were not all the same, and why in some old camps their arrowheads were different, and why there were no pieces of pottery in some sites, and in others pottery shards were everywhere: Those non-pottery people were from a much older civilization that had not mastered the art of pottery making.
I have an extensive arrowhead collection along with ax and spear heads from my early teens. That interest didn't end with high school graduation. As soon as I enrolled at the University of Arkansas I began to search the creek banks and fields in northwest Arkansas for relics, and worked one summer with the University Museum on an archaeological dig.
I was in my mid-20s when I took a job transfer to Libya. It was a geologist-archaeologist-history dream come true. My work in the desert let me hunt for fossils and relics in the ruins along the coast and search German coastal fortifications. The ultra-dry desert reduces the deteriorating of things such as German Jerry cans (armed forces unit canisters), and in one remote spot I found a crashed and burned World War I biplane.
When Vertis and I were in town, we headed for one of the ancient Greek-Roman ruins along the coast. I traded a young boy a ballpoint pen for a Roman coin at Tolmaitha, a Greek-Roman ruin. A weekend drive up the coast where a gain in elevation and rainfall changed the desert from bare ground to a fir forest took us to the ruins of Cyrene; Simon of Cyrene carried the cross for Christ.
Standing amid the columns of Cyrene, looking down at ruins of the harbor at Apollonia a half-mile away, is a sight I will always remember.
On our fifth wedding anniversary, we flew to Athens for a mini-vacation. Naturally, we headed for the Acropolis and the Parthenon, and the next day braved a snowstorm to visit Delphi. It was a breathtaking trip.
Back in Benghazi later that year, we took a week off and went to Tripoli. Just north of the city lie the ruins of Sabratha, perched on a ridge overlooking the Mediterranean. The Roman theater there is one of the best preserved in the Mediterranean.
If you have a history-archaeology interest, you have read about Hannibal and the Punic wars. I had to visit Carthage, Hannibal's capital city, in Tunisia. When the Romans defeated Hannibal, they destroyed the city. Over the past 25 years, the women of Tunis have uncovered and protected the inlaid marble on its numerous villa floors. They are remarkable.
When we left Libya, we had accumulated six weeks of vacation. We started by flying to Rome and taking trains to Siena and Florence. We almost wore ourselves out taking in the Colesseum, Michelangelo's sculpture "David," and scores of historic sites.
The Vatican Museums are unbelievable, and Michelangelo's "The Pieta" is still vivid in my mind. In Milan we saw Leonardo da Vinci's mural "The Last Supper," which was originally a backdrop wall for a nuns' dining hall.
We had to visit Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" at the Louvre in Paris, and on the way home we couldn't pass up the British Museum in London where we saw the Elgin Marbles, which were taken off the Parthenon.
"Saved from being destroyed," the Brits say. "Stolen," the Greeks say.
I especially enjoyed going deep underground in London to the World War II war rooms where Churchill and his war cabinet plotted how to defeat the Germans. I sat in Churchill's chair. His notepad and pencil were where he had left them.
As soon as we got home and settled in Corpus Christi, we started traveling to Mexico, and in Mexico City we visited the Toltec ruins and climbed the Mesoamerican pyramids.
In Belize, we ventured deeply into the pre-Columbian Maya ruins. We stayed in San Pedro, a small village on a barrier island, and on one trip waded across a shallow lagoon through knee-deep mud to a little back-bay island.
There we visited the ruins of an ancient Mayan village, saw a water well dug by hand through limestone, and rummaged through the village's 1,000-year-old garbage dump for broken pots. It was a great experience.
The next day we boated up the New River to the ruins of Altun Ha and climbed its giant truncated pyramid. Belize is a dream vacation where you can fish, snorkel, and beach-comb to pick up items such as thick glass bases of wine bottles. They came from a Spanish galleon that sank on the reef in the 1500s. (A bowl of thick-bottom glass wine bottles sits on a coffee table in our living room.)
We returned to Greece several times, and stood where Paul preached in Athens. A year later, on a driving trip down the Turkish coast, we walked down the marble road to the Roman Amphitheater in Ephesus, and climbed up to the stage where Paul faced a jeering crowd.
The best was a Christmas trip to Egypt when our kids were 14 and 16 (a detailed account is in a previous column). A couple of highlights I didn't mention in that column are the continuing excavations uncovering wonderful finds; some of the new sonar rock penetration techniques are revealing extraordinary discoveries.
The crystal-clear Nile River, around which much of Egyptian history is woven, is fascinating. A number of years back a cave was discovered where, when the country was in upheaval, the ancient Egyptian priests had gone into tombs of pharaohs and took their mummies to a secret cave to keep tomb robbers away from them.
When the authorities moved the mummies by boat down the Nile to the museum, local people lined the river banks and wailed in anguish as if the pharaohs had just died.
As Vertis remarked after one of our vacations, "I've seen enough ruins to last a lifetime."
Email Richard Mason at richard@gibraltarenergy.com.