Travel Time - Departing Texas and Arriving in Cairo

We woke early on the 17th, exhausted. I had packed and repacked, weighed and re-weighed our luggage so many times. Jason hadn’t slept in 3 nights; he had so much on his mind. We had some errands and last-minute things to do that morning, so we got an early start. We took a few more things to storage before joining Mom and Daddy for hotcakes. Dad made some of the best hotcakes I’ve eaten in years—a great last meal before leaving home! After breakfast, I still had lots to do, so I got back to work and Mom watched Luke. I tried to work quickly so I could spend some time with my parents before we left—we’d been with them for 17 days, but I still wanted to spend the last morning visiting before we left—but I couldn’t seem to get everything done. Finally, I got my shower, got dressed and ready to go, and then went downstairs to see them, and the Farleys arrived to take us to the airport. It suddenly hit me that my time was up. As soon as I heard that the Farleys were there, I cried. I went into Mom & Dad’s room and just sat on the bed, crying. After collecting myself, I was able to go out and see the Farleys and the Shabouts, who had just arrived. (Yes, we needed multiple vehicles to get us to the airport.)

My sister Kari arrived shortly thereafter to go with us, too. After we got the luggage loaded, our friends graciously said they’d go out to their cars so our family could have some time to say goodbye and visit a few more minutes. Those last minutes were so hard—We got into the cars—Luke and I went with the Farleys and Jason rode with the Shabouts—and drove away. My family waved, and I looked back to see them one last time before we left. So hard to know I wouldn’t see them for four more months.

(Small sidenote: I know this is not great writing, but this is why I love my blog…I can write with as much rawness as I like and not worry about polishing it up for publication (yet…maybe someday). You can read it if you want…or not! I do always feel the need to apologize for the roughness of the blog, though…)

When we arrived at the DFW international terminal I really wanted to say, “Ummm….I don’t think I’m gonna go…” Too late for that, though. We unloaded the bags onto a big rolling cart and said our goodbyes to our friends. A baggage helper got us into the terminal and up to the desk. I’d been told not to tape up our bins until arriving at the airport in case they needed to be inspected. However, the guy at the desk told us to tape them up right away, because the inspection point was after the bags were checked in. Our baggage helper helped tape everything up. I was so grateful for his help. I was still not thinking clearly at all. When the agent weighed our bags, everything weighed in fine. I was very concerned that they were going to be overweight, despite my checking and rechecking.

The agent put our bins on the conveyor belt, and as the first one rounded the curve out of sight one of the guide posts on the conveyor belt sliced right through the tape. I hadn’t really been worried about the actual transportation of our stuff until that moment. I worried about it for a while after that, but then decided there was nothing I could do about it, and whether or not our stuff made it intact was out of my control.

We went through security, which took forever, and then found our gate. At the gate I asked if we could gate check two of our carry-on items. The lady gave me a hard time about not asking before at the check-in counter and about how heavy our carry-ons were. I was really afraid that I’d blown it, and that they were going to charge us $300 for these two heavy bags. Thankfully, she did not, and she went ahead and checked our bags through to Cairo. That was a plus, considering we were carrying 2 backpacks, one rolling bag, Luke’s little bag, a carseat, and a stroller AFTER the two carry-ons were checked.

We sat down in the gate area to wait for the flight. Jason took Luke for a walk while I read, and then a little while before boarding time they came back. I got Luke’s present from Mimi out of my bag and let him open it. It was the neatest thing ever. Mom made him an Egypt Book. The cover says, “Luke’s Egypt Book” and has pictures of the pyramids, hieroglyphics, and feluccas on the Nile. On the first page, she wrote him a letter about how much she is going to miss him. The following pages each have something for him to count-one Lone Star on a Texas-shaped card (the star spins, too!), two hearts, with pictures of Mom and Dad inside, along with voice-recordings of messages from them to Luke, three passports, four suitcases (I wish we’d only had four!), five pyramids, etc. She made some really neat pages that are so special. The whole thing is such a treasure. I bawled as we looked through the book.

We boarded the airplane without any trouble. As soon as everyone else boarded, Jason distributed earplugs to those around us and apologized in advance if Luke made lots of noise! Most people smiled at him, but I think his apology worried them. They needn’t have worried; Luke was an absolute dream through the whole ten-hour flight. There were three other babies on the flight who took turns crying so that the entire 10 hours were filled with “waaaahh!” Luke slept for part of it, watched Barney (as promised), read his Egypt book, colored, and played with the toys I brought for him. We got up periodically to take little walks up and down the aisle so that he didn’t get too tired of sitting. Jason slept a bunch and carried on a conversation with a man from Cameroon, I listened to Harry Potter on my iPod and tried to sleep.

We arrived in Frankfurt, where we had a 6-hour layover. That was probably the most miserable part of the whole trip. There was nothing to do, the airport was hot, and we were all irritable. Luke and I went walking around the airport. We rode up and down the same escalators probably 30-40 times. Luke got pretty cranky just before boarding time (which was delayed about an hour) and fell asleep on my shoulder. He is not as light as he used to be! We were able to put him in his carseat and keep him asleep, but we had to carry him (in the carseat) up and down stairs and onto a bus, which took us to the plane.

The flight from Frankfurt to Cairo was pretty uneventful. All of us slept. Jason sat next to a German man who told him Cairo was terrible, filthy, polluted, and crowded! We watched Barney two more times. As we got closer to Cairo, we could see the city outside the windows. As we descended into the city I could only see desert as far as I could see. (“What have I done?” I thought.) I leaned over to Jason and sang “Welcome to the desert!” (a la “Welcome to the Jungle”). Luke picked up the phrase and immediately started singing, pretty loudly, “welcome to the desert!” (laughs…) “welcome to the desert!” (more laughing) “welcome to the desert!” (boy, that kid really gets a kick out of himself!).

When we landed and got off the plane we were met almost immediately by a man holding an AIS sign. He asked for our passports and then put visa stickers in them. The first one he did was mine. The sticker extended past the edge of the passport page and had to be folded over onto the back of the page. He did Luke’s next, and his visa overlapped across the fold between the two facing pages. Jason is very picky about his passport, and he insisted that the man turn the visa on the page so that it neither hung off nor overlapped in his passport.

We followed the man to passport control, where we got our entry stamps, and then to baggage claim. Our stroller came off first, followed by our carry-ons and our tubs. Our tubs all arrived intact! There seemed to be so many compared to the number of bags our fellow teachers brought. We joined up with three other teachers, who were all very friendly to us, and especially to Luke. The men who met us at the airport helped us push our carts (we had 3!) through immigration. At immigration the officers were concerned with why we chose to bring tubs instead of suitcases, and one of them asked Jason, “Why you do this? Who told you to do this? Don’t do it again!” As if they have any say-so about what we pack in. As far as I am concerned, they can open those tubs and see what’s in them, but good luck repacking all those space bags in after they’ve been opened! All in all, our trip through Cairo’s airport went much more smoothly than we anticipated.

As we exited immigration we were met by several teachers and administrators from AIS. They gave us our settling in allowance ($600), a few bottles of water (for which I was really grateful later on!) and led us to the school buses. Porters from the school put all our luggage on the bus, and the we were driven through Cairo to the Pearl Hotel in Maadi. The drive through Cairo in the dark was interesting. I had heard that driving here is crazy—there are no lane divisions, people drive the wrong way down one-way streets (There are no one-way streets, only one-way signs!), and there are no crosswalks for pedestrians. As we left the airport, I was surprised to see that there were lane divisions, but they only lasted a few miles. We very quickly got into real Cairo traffic. I chose not to watch much, and instead I talked to the other teachers riding with us.

At the Pearl Hotel, the bellmen took our luggage upstairs to our room. We were on the 4th floor in a small room, which reminded us of an old European hotel room. It had two twin beds. Jason, who had imagined something much nicer, was disappointed. I was happy to see beds and a shower. After we put our luggage down, we went across the street to a restaurant called Spicy Joe’s (which we have since renamed several times: Sneaky Fred’s, Stinky Bob’s, etc.) where we got some food and heard information and instructions from a returning teacher, Elyse. We were to meet in the morning to begin apartment hunting at 8:00.

We got back to our hotel room and had quick showers before bed. We ended up shoving the 2 twin beds together, putting Luke in between us, and crashing. We all slept pretty hard!

The next post will be about our first real day in Cairo, including info about our apartment hunt and the apartment we ended up choosing.