Saturday, October 14, 2022, Cairo

I order an Egyptian Beer in the airport and I don’t realize what a treat it will be for the next week or more. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I remember back to last night and the view from our hotel room.

We wake up and it wasn’t a dream. The Pyramids are still there! Somewhat hazy and dirty air surrounds them though. There is a 3^rd pyramid back in the distance that we can see in the daylight also. This a very dirty 3^rd world city and incomplete buildings are everywhere. We notice that the roads around our hotel are not paved. We hadn’t noticed that last night.

Breakfast is brought to our room at 10AM as promised and it is quite tasty, consisting of homemade bread, omelette, olives and goat cheese and marmalade. Coffee is also hot. We dine overlooking the view although the air is quite dirty and at one point the pyramids get clouded over for an hour.

We check out and the hotel driver takes us down the street to our next hotel, the Oasis Hotel, in the neighboring city of Giza. Much nicer hotel minus the view. This is where our Tour will begin.

But with no word yet on our lost luggage, our tour guide takes us to a large local mall and leaves us for 2 hours. We shop frantically to get the necessary clothing and sundries to carry us for a few days along with a pair of small rolling suitcases. I am more successful than Elee as finding things for women in Egypt is a bit more difficult than finding things for men.

Back to the hotel for a 6 PM Tour Briefing, we then board a bus that takes us to a Dinner Cruise on the Nile and includes live Egyptian drummers, a Belly Dancer and even a Whirling Dervish! We chat amicably with fellow Tour Mates and thouroghly enjoy the shows!

Then it’s back to the hotel where we get the sad news that our luggage still hasn’t arrived. So it’s overseas phone calls to try to rectify the problem as we pack up our meager belongings and head to bed as we have a 6 AM wake up call to go tour the Pyramids!

Good night all!

Oct 13-14, 2022

We have our friend Tony to thank for getting us to the airport on time! However, this first flight gets delayed 1.5 hours. Sad news because we only have a 2 hour layover in NYC that is scheduled. Sure enough, we arrive in NYC in time to rush out of the plane and scurry to our connection, luckily it’s only 2 Gates away. But the plane is boarded and they print us new Boarding Passes as they have already cancelled our existing ones.

We get on the next plane bound for Amman, Jordan and it backs away from the Gate on time. But then worry sets back in because we seem to sit on the Tarmac near the Terminal for a very long time. It is raining hard. Or so it seems. Finally we find ourselves on the runway with that familiar Whoosh of the engines and we are away into the skies! This flight is scheduled for 9.5 hours in the air. I settle in and watch a 2 hour movie. By now, Royal Jordanian Airlines is serving us a hot meal. Yes, A HOT MEAL!!! When have we last seen that on an airplane? Not for over a decade!

Okay, now there is still a good 7 hours plus to fly and my doctor, bless his heart, wrote me a prescription for sleeping pills and I take one and settle back. Being in the aisle seat, I offered my seatmates the opportunity to get up and use the facilities which they took me up on. I then got a good undisturbed 6 hours sleep and woke refreshed just in time for Royal Jordanian to serve a Hot Breakfast! Yay!

We land on time in Amman and the flight to Cairo is uneventful. Hanging around the Baggage Claim, it eventually becomes apparent that our luggage isn’t arriving. We find the Lost Baggage Window and try to report the missing luggage. The inform us that we need to wait a while as it might show up. But it never does. So finally they allow us to file a claim and now we can only hope it shows up in a day or so. We suspect the problem is our connection in NYC where we ran to our plane. The baggage handlers were likely not as quick in the pouring rain.

Also lucky for us, our hotel ride waited for us at the airport and took us to our hotel, a good one hour plus ride in totally crazy traffic! Reminded us of Peru where lane demarcations meant nothing and horns were the most important notification system for drivers! The buildings and neighborhoods we passed reminded us of Cuba, a lot of partially demolished and unfinished facades. This is totally a Third World Country!

But we eventually get to our hotel, accessing it in a run down alley, similar to our description of our Havana BnB. There is an elevator that takes us up to the 10th Floor and the Maitre De accompanies us. Then we walk up stairs to the 11th Floor and into our room. It is clean yet tiny, but as the promised description had, the view is spectacular overlooking the Pyramids!

October 12, 2022

Well, they’re back. What, You say? Those pre trip jitters. Do I have everything packed? Did we make all the appropriate adjustments and get all the correct Visas? Do we have all the correct amounts of cash in all the different Country Currencies? Are all of our excursions booked correctly?

Well, at least this time we are traveling to places that accept Credit Cards, not like that trip to Cuba where Credit Cards didn’t work. But thinking back, I’d do that one again, it was so much fun! But I digress.

This time it’s 5 Countries worth of Visas and Passports. And we will make a complete circumnavigation of the world for the second time in our lives. Last time was on a ship. This time there will be a lot of Airplanes involved. 3rd World Countries galore. 1st World experiences! I packed my water purifier because I think I may need it!

Hope I can sleep tonight! At least we don’t have to head off to the airport until a reasonable hour. That’s a bargain at twice the price! Bringing 4 cameras this trip, LOL. I’ll be equipped no matter the shot! The promise of the view out of our first hotel room is simply amazing, but I’ll wait to see if it comes true!

So, my readers, I’ll leave you with some suspense here (A few of you may even know where we are going!). But I’ll tell you this. There will be several climates but we will stay North of the Equator this time. And I promise the photos should amaze, at least I know they’ll amaze me! I expect to have poor internet a lot of the time so I’ll be writing this Blog on a word processor a lot and uploading when I can. Also, I don’t know how much Photo Editing Time I’ll have or how much end of the day energy I’ll have, but I will try to get a few posts up while the trip goes on.

So, off to sleep for me and the airport calls in the morning!

Tybee Island Dolphin Boat Tour

Today we get up and check out of the hotel for the last time as we will travel home today. we find a breakfast restaurant and have a buffet breakfast consisting of eggs, hash browns and sausages and hot coffee.

We then head for the boat docks and check in to Captain Mike’s Dolphin Tours and are soon cruising out into the Atlantic where Bottlenose Dolphins swim around us and entertain us with their babies. Our cameras happily click away as we watch them frolic in the warm ocean water. In total we see literally dozens if not a hundred dolphins in a matter of an hour and it is a good day.

On the way back, Captain Mike takes us by an old lighthouse that is under restoration and our cameras are happy once more. We get back to the docks and depart with still plenty of time before we have to head for the airport so we head into the historic district of Savannah and look up the Pirates Restaurant that we saw on our tour the other day and go inside for drinks as the day has turned into a typical hot and humid one. While there the skies open up and deluge rain upon the city.

When it’s time to leave, the skies are still not cooperating and we have parked an unpleasant block and a half away. So I brave the elements and jog through the deluge to the car, getting no less than soaked to the skin to bring the car around to Elee to save her the same fate and we head off to the airport. Luckily for me, the mixture of heat and air conditioning in the car dry me off mostly by the time we reach the terminal.

We return the rental car and get into the airport, getting our bags checked in and get through security without any hassles and have time to stop in a bar in the terminal to await our flight. All in all, it has been a good if not tiring vacation. After 2 flights and a 1 AM arrival in Los Angeles, we finally get home around 2:30AM with a shuttle ride. Tired and exhausted, we retire for the night to awake and unpack in the morning!

Day 02 Tybee Island GA

We actually sleep in to 10 AM today! It is a welcome relief to getting up and traveling every day! We put our swim suits on and hit the beach, a short 900 foot walk. After a couple hours on the beach and in the surf we are done with the beach.

We come back to our room and shower and walk next door for lunch at Sting Ray’s and the food is good. Back to the room for a nap and then we go in search of a lighthouse we have heard of, the “Tybee Island Lighthouse”. As we approach the area, the storm clouds are amazing and our cameras love it! We arrive and buy our tickets amid warnings that we may be ordered to come down at any moment because of the storms in the area. I tell the people in charge that I want to photograph the storms from the top of the lighthouse and they get nervous and threaten to revoke permission for me to go up! I laugh and tell them I’m kidding (inside I’m not) and promise to play by the rules and they let me go up.

It seems to take forever to climb the 178 steps to the top and I am winded when I get there but the views are fantastic and the storms are brewing! I get photos from all sides just as the rains start and lightning starts to light up the skies. I don’t hear it but the word has come to evacuate the lighthouse. I am the last one down but not so slow as to worry the people in charge, it seems. All is well and I have my shots! All is for the best as the central core and all the steps are are metal so if there was a strike, I’d be okay?

We tour a couple buildings on the ground and see how people lived in the 17 and 1800’s and then drive off back to our Motel. Not too soon it seems as a vicious storm sweeps through the area and lightning and thunder is all around. I still wish I could capture some lightning on camera but it is not to be so.

So another nap it is while the storm passes and then it’s off to dinner at a restaurant called, “Bubba Gumbos”, which after we get seated and served, the food is very good, however the building is sinking into the bayou if that is what you can call it and our wine glasses were actually sliding off the table and we had constantly had to grab them and it was rather humorous!

After dinner, it was time for sunset and we go out the next door, and at a restaurant called “CoCo’s”, there are docks out back with great views of the sunset and we hang out there and photograph the sunset.

Then it’s back to our room to turn in for the night! See you all tomorrow!