Day 1: Departure and Travel

My husband and I decided to sign up for a dream of a lifetime vacation - an elegant cruise on the Nile. After looking at a couple of options we chose a Viking Cruise on one of their older boats, because it looked like the kind of elegant ship that was used by the elite in the olden days. I decided pretty early on that I wanted to be on the HS Antares. It was old, had a sauna and wooden inlaid floors - charm and elegance that I expected on a Nile Cruise. The only problem was that the only vacancies were in August more than a year in the future. Summer is not, of course, an ideal time to visit an already warm climate, but it didn't matter, I wanted to be on THAT ship and so my spousal unit and I decided to bear with the heat for the pleasure of the style.

We let Viking arrange our flights (something I would not do again as they chose three sets of flights each direction, when two would have been just as easy and much shorter in length.) The first flight was to Newark. They tried to take my small carry-on bag away from me because the  overhead bins filled up quickly. In fact I was the first person to be required to relinquish my bag. It made me angry because I was SO careful in packing and even went down a suitcase size to be sure to fit on the smaller flights (of which this was NOT one). Because some other people were selfish and insisted on taking on too much luggage, we would have to wait at baggage pick-up.  They tagged my bag, but nobody was at the door of the plane to take my bag, so I carried it with me onto the plane and stowed in first class. When we left the plane the flight attendant saw the tag and glared at me, telling me I was supposed to leave it at the door, even though there was no one to there to collect it. I was not prepared to go 17 days with only the change of clothing in my small back pack, so I am glad I had not left the bag. (No one on the smaller flights tried to take my bag, so I really think the airline could have handled this better!

The flight was fine. We passed over a nuclear plant and the usual fields and highways.

It was the layover in the airport that was hard. It seemed to last forever. The second flight which went to Frankfurt was wonderful, because it was half-empty. There were so many unfilled seats that we could stretch out in the plane and sleep - exactly what we needed in preparation for all the walking and activity we would experience in Egypt. The flight wasn't quite long enough to get sufficient sleep, but it did go a long way toward keeping us awake enough later to on to manage to find and catch our next flights.

Again the wait in the Frankfurt airport was long and grueling and I was starting to feel I was already ready to go home, but it was probably the long night and insufficient amount of sleep.

This is a shot of some of the fields and villages in Germany or France from the window of the plane.

The last leg of the journey was a flight from Frankfurt to Cairo. The plane was hot, but I met a lovely woman in a hijab, with whom I was able to practice my Arabic a bit. When we got to the airport, we met with our Viking representative Raul and eventually boarded the bus to go to our hotel. We were SO tired that we basically tumbled into bed upon arrival. We had a great view of the Nile out our window.

Inside was clean and comfortable. We were ready to sleep!