It’s always good to go to church on Sunday and even better when you’re traveling. You can never have too many people praying for a safe trip and my Brother’s Church always make a big deal about the your visit. This welcome tells you a lot about Texas hospitality with plenty of hugs and lots of good food. Yes my brother was not going to have us leave Texas hungry. He made sure that we had another serving of the wonderful brisket on a bun with some barbeque sauce. Hard to beat for a dine and dash meal. The trip to the airport went like clockwork.
12:45 Departure from Church, Hit the gas station for a refuel at about 1:15, Returned the car and was on the shuttle to the Airport by 1:30. Check in went smooth for Grace, Ti and Kyle but they found there was a problem with my return leg. “ Mr. Willis you include a flight from Toronto to Chicago that you did not pay for” Ok so how did this happen? I have all my seat and reservation print outs with no side trip to Chicago. My known return documented in my details book was Cairo, London, Toronto and Houston. I showed the document to the nice ticketing counter clerk and she started looking at the screen, scratch her head, looking, scratching, looking, and scratching. All this fuss makes you start to think oh my gosh I can get to Cairo but never return. After 10 minutes of this she calls in a Manager who gives me a boarding pass, takes my bag and hands me a new itinerary. Guess what all my business class seats on the return flights are now gone and I’m in coach going Cairo, London, Toronto, Chicago and then Houston. Oh well I thought the business class seats were a mistake anyway as the mileage that I used was not for business class. Darn I was just teasing the kids not 10 minutes earlier that I would be drinking champagne in business class and they were giving me hell about it. Ok with check in completed it off to security. My sister In law Debbie was telling us about the new full body scanner and the pat down screening that was causing quite a steer with Airline passengers. She was stating it was wrong just wrong look at every detail of your body. Guess what both Grace and Ti were picked for the full scan. For a guy well I just don’t see what all the fuss is about, so I’m interested in the response from the ladies after it is all done. From Grace” I have no problem with it except the fact that they dig through all your personal affects when they could have easily just scanned them. “ From Ti “ I didn’t mind because it was a lady doing the pat down and she was nice” Well for me the only issue I had was the fact that all the carryon’s were left in the scanner area. This could increase the chances of theft because there is no way to secure your items while they conduct the body scan\ search. Seeing a problem with this I got the family together after the security station to talk it over and come up with a plan going forward. If one of the family ended up getting scanned searched the other members would collect all the carry on. I think we will run into this again in London so I wanted everyone to be ready. We arrived at the gate just when the boarding started, once again Grace had a smile because there was not running. I can tell she still once to run because old habits are hard to break. Once on the flight we noticed that all the video monitors were blank in our section. A few moments later an announcement from the flight attendant confirmed our fears. They are broken for a 9 hour flight. No lights, No video no nothing. Ah but the flight attendants have a solution. Free drinks to calm the passengers and we accepted the offer. We would party then sleep and forget the whole movie thing all together. Another Gin and Tonic please! Thank you very much.
It’s always good to go to church on Sunday and even better when you’re traveling. You can never have too many people praying for a safe trip and my Brother’s Church always make a big deal about the your visit. This welcome tells you a lot about Texas hospitality with plenty of hugs and lots of good food. Yes my brother was not going to have us leave Texas hungry. He made sure that we had another serving of the wonderful brisket on a bun with some barbeque sauce. Hard to beat for a dine and dash meal. The trip to the airport went like clockwork.
12:45 Departure from Church, Hit the gas station for a refuel at about 1:15, Returned the car and was on the shuttle to the Airport by 1:30. Check in went smooth for Grace, Ti and Kyle but they found there was a problem with my return leg. “ Mr. Willis you include a flight from Toronto to Chicago that you did not pay for” Ok so how did this happen? I have all my seat and reservation print outs with no side trip to Chicago. My known return documented in my details book was Cairo, London, Toronto and Houston. I showed the document to the nice ticketing counter clerk and she started looking at the screen, scratch her head, looking, scratching, looking, and scratching. All this fuss makes you start to think oh my gosh I can get to Cairo but never return. After 10 minutes of this she calls in a Manager who gives me a boarding pass, takes my bag and hands me a new itinerary. Guess what all my business class seats on the return flights are now gone and I’m in coach going Cairo, London, Toronto, Chicago and then Houston. Oh well I thought the business class seats were a mistake anyway as the mileage that I used was not for business class. Darn I was just teasing the kids not 10 minutes earlier that I would be drinking champagne in business class and they were giving me hell about it. Ok with check in completed it off to security. My sister In law Debbie was telling us about the new full body scanner and the pat down screening that was causing quite a steer with Airline passengers. She was stating it was wrong just wrong look at every detail of your body. Guess what both Grace and Ti were picked for the full scan. For a guy well I just don’t see what all the fuss is about, so I’m interested in the response from the ladies after it is all done. From Grace” I have no problem with it except the fact that they dig through all your personal affects when they could have easily just scanned them. “ From Ti “ I didn’t mind because it was a lady doing the pat down and she was nice” Well for me the only issue I had was the fact that all the carryon’s were left in the scanner area. This could increase the chances of theft because there is no way to secure your items while they conduct the body scan\ search. Seeing a problem with this I got the family together after the security station to talk it over and come up with a plan going forward. If one of the family ended up getting scanned searched the other members would collect all the carry on. I think we will run into this again in London so I wanted everyone to be ready. We arrived at the gate just when the boarding started, once again Grace had a smile because there was not running. I can tell she still once to run because old habits are hard to break. Once on the flight we noticed that all the video monitors were blank in our section. A few moments later an announcement from the flight attendant confirmed our fears. They are broken for a 9 hour flight. No lights, No video no nothing. Ah but the flight attendants have a solution. Free drinks to calm the passengers and we accepted the offer. We would party then sleep and forget the whole movie thing all together. Another Gin and Tonic please! Thank you very much.
In London we arrived at the terminal and the gate for our next flight to Cairo was not assigned. We knew Graces Mom would be around someplace but this Airport is big. We had Grace watch the bags and the kids and I searched the holding area high and low. We found her waiting with the smile you see below.
By this time the gate was assigned and off we went to find it because most of the gates are a 15 minute walk from the holding area. 4 more hours to Cairo.
The flight was much better as all the movies worked fine. Everyone got in a good movie or two and we even saw the pyramids as we circled Cairo on the decent. Below is a tile art work in the lobby of the Cairo International airport.
I was really glad we had someone to pick us up a the airport because the scene curb side could have really been a bit much. I was asked a number of time if I need a taxi or a hotel and just the newness of it all would have set us back a bit. Everyone was cool not one really push at all just a different situation to absorb.
The tour operator helped us get a cell phone SIM card and dropped us off at the hotel. First equipment failure of the trip was the converter. The converted from a US plug to an Egypt plug would not work. I found the fuse had blown. No way was I going to find a fuse at 7 PM in Cairo by myself and I really need to charge the cell phone. Time for a McGyver moment, I found that Kyle had an aluminum candy bar wrapper that I could wrap around the fuse to get it going. See picture below.
The room is no Hilton but then again we did not pay Hilton prices either. It was clean with tile floors in the bathroom an new fixtures. After a quick trip to the restaurant for some food and some local beer I was ready for the bed..Another day is behind us with the Pyramids schedule for the morning.
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