It's 1:00 am in the Cairo Airport - we have cleared customs in Egypt and a 4:15 am flight will start us for home. Hard to believe a year's planning is all over. Bill and I both agree that using Intrepid Travel was well worth the money. There were so many things that we never would have done - never would have considered - never would have even known about had we done all the planning on our own. Siwa Oasis & Baharya Oasis are great examplkes of that. We wo...

Today's featured blogger is Tom Ponsonby. This posting (1/19/08) arrived close to the final leg of our travelers' trip. Just in case these sojourners don't have another opportunity to write about their adventures this weekend, these are the return arrangements: Steav, Bill B., and Tom arrive back in Charlotte this Monday/Tuesday . . . Lisa and Bill C. travel on to Morocco for an additional week before landing in North Carolina the following Tuesday (1/29). FROM...

FROM STEAV AND BILL Saturday Camel....the other red meat: tastes like a good pot roast. Our Falluca cruised into a small village south of Luxor: the end of our trip with Mustaffa and Omar after a very pleasant sail. Private van/bus to Luxor after a short, bumpy, dusty, crowded visit to a camel market . . . and a look around a village (name unknown and certainly not on anyone's "places to go" list). This is poverty at a subsistence level and shows an...

Photos taken by our wanderers are NOT being posted because they have yet to encounter any location where digital images could be affordably transmitted! Likely we will wait to return, pool our phots and put albums of the best ones up later. Steav's return to writing also means that Bill C. is back to typing these marvelous messages into his Blackberry (while sailing on the Fellucca). This is definitely one time when Bill's detail-orientation and "all thumbs...

Here's a compilation of email excerpts written by fellow-travelers Tom and Bill C. to their respective spouses here in Charlotte: Our "fabulous five" (connected by family and/or St. Gabriel Choir) constitutes nearly half of this STA Travel Tour twelvesome. Joining our Charlotte ensemble in Cairo are seven more 20-ish "student types": 2 from Canada, 2 from New Zealand, 2 from Australia, 1 more from the USA (thus we are now a group of 7 women ...