Just a little over 7 weeks to go until Elaine and I get on a plane in Orlando and head to Egypt for a two week trip. Pyramids, mummies, King Tut, the Nile, hieroglyphics, tombs...all of these things say "Egypt". Egyptology was not offered as a class when I was in college so I never officially studied it. I have studied it on my own for many years now. I have coffee table type books on Egypt that I've had since high school. I've been to a lot of museums throughout Europe that have very good Egyptian collections, including the British Museum. (We will forget for the moment that most of their collection was stolen from the Egyptian people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.)
Since I've already seen mummies and other archaeological finds, why am I going to Egypt? Mainly becase I can. I was reading a copy of "Budget Travel" magazine shortly before my birthday last year. I ran across a trip to Egypt that was described in the "DEALS" section and couldn't believe the price was so low. I showed it to Marcia, but she wasn't interested. I told Elaine about it at my birthday dinner shortly afterwards, and she was interested. Now, in all fairness, I did ask other people if they wanted to go with us, but everyone else that expressed an early interest changed their minds.
With an interested person to go with, I started to research. I looked at several companies and we ended up choosing Gate 1 Travel. We ended up saving a good chunk of money over the other company I originally was interested in. Then we had to pick a date. That's not as easy as it sounds. I could go just about any time, but Elaine has work and family responsibilities. October sounded like a good month, but it didn't quite work, so we ended up picking November 11 as a start date. We return on Thanksgiving evening two weeks later. A phone call to the travel company, a credit card number and other info and we were booked on a non-refundable airline ticket. Guess we are going! Final payment was made about six weeks later. My bank account looks pitiful by now, but this is a dream trip for me. I'll worry about starving later.
More info about the trip itself in the next entry...
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