Getting There (Days 1-2)

4/3/08 I didn’t get to bed until 3am because I was up packing and getting last minute stuff together. After eating a late breakfast with Dr. and Mrs. Yamamoto, they dropped me off at the airport. It was off to Chicago on a Boeing 777 at 1pm. During my seven hour layover, the Kisers picked me up and we went over to Bible Truth Publishers for dinner and a tour. I was impressed with the place and grateful for the chance to visit with people during my layover. Then it was off to Amman, Jordan on an Airbus A340. If I remember correctly, it was close to a 15 hour flight. I was surprised that in addition to the usual flight tracking, they also kept track of where Kaaba was relative to the plane. There was also a travel prayer in Arabic. We arrived in Amman at 6:30pm the following day.

4/4/08 A scheduled one and a half hour layover in Amman turned into a three hour delay. They never really told us what was going on. I was worried to because that meant I would get into Cairo, Egypt pretty late. I was already concerned about getting in at 8:15pm. I wasn’t sure that my ride would stick around to take me to the hotel. The guy in the seat next to me, a refugee from Ramallah, was actually supposed to stay at the same hotel and offered to let me go with his driver. As it turns out, my ride was there when I got in a close to 11am. He already had my visa and we were back at the hotel, Intercontinental Pyramids, by mid-night. It had been 30 hours since I left my apartment in Dallas. Cairo is huge and the drivers are crazy. People just drive where they can fit and sometimes can’t fit. A quick little dinner and then I tried to sleep. However, it was 5pm Dallas time, so I tossed and turned for five or six hours.