From Day 3 in Egypt I’ve got 150 more photos up. We travel to Luxor and visit Karnak, a school and the temple of Luxor (at night).

So I’m sure you’ve heard of Skype, right? You can use it to make “phone calls” from computer to computer for free. I used it to make phone calls from Egypt to the US while I was there, it cost me about 2.1 cents per minute to make a call to any telephone in the US (I could have called another Skype computer for free).

They’ve just made it more free. Yes, I said free, to call the US and Canada for the rest of the year (2006). It shouldn’t matter where you are in the world, to call me would be free for the rest of the year. So download Skype now and give it a try.

FYI, I’ve ditched my landline phone at home and have just my cellular phone. So I programmed Skype with my local police/fire number so if I ever have a crisis I can at least use my computer for an emergency phone call (if needed). I just called up and said, I’ve just got a cell phone what’s the best non-911 number to call when I have an emergency.

Here’s how it normally works, they lease a bunch of phone lines around the world, it’s your job (using the Internet) to place the call using the Internet. Depending on the location they set the price, Egypt for example is 18.5 cents a minute, they don’t care where you are calling from (the USA, Egypt or from the same house you are calling to) it still costs 18.5 cents for them to make that call to Egypt. Except for now, calling to the USA and Canada is FREE.

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So as I mentioned before all the drivers did as they went around was honk, honk, honk. I thought it was funny when I saw this sign that said they shouldn’t honk.

At least that’s what I thought it meant, I don’t recall any less honking.

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So when I was in one of the hotels in Egypt I saw this “hieroglyphic” sign and it struck me as funny so I took a photo of it.

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This batch of 40+ photos from my second day of the trip consists of one album that jumps around a bit. Be sure to look back at the third week of April to see the original comments about the trip, I’ll try not to repeat myself too much.

So I’m putting together collections of photos from the trip. In an attempt to not overwhelm you (and myself) I’ll do one of these every few days highlighting a day (or maybe just a portion of the day depending on how many photos I took that day).

This first day consists of two albums.

So I was playing with Yahoo! Photos and put up about 100 random Egypt photos of mine.

You can view Yahoo! Photos on TiVo and I wanted to see how they worked out…

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So as they were excavating around the pyramids they found a pit. The pit was covered with a row of cover stones that they say kept it hermetically sealed. Inside it they found 1024 pieces of wood and rope. After examining it they decided it was a ship and it was marked reasonably well on how to assemble it. So they did!

They built a museum around the location of the pit’s original location so that you can see how and where it was originally found. They then proceeded to build an elevated museum around it and the full ship is assembled inside. It’s absolutely ginormous, the pictures do not do it justice at all. While they did use rope from the current day and age to assemble it, the original rope was in incredible shape.

While they found two other pits, they decided to leave them as they were, the boat was deteriorating and the left the others to be “taken care of by the gods”.

Plus, they made us wear goofy slippers over our shoes when we came in to cut down on the dust and dirt in the museum. We all felt like we were wearing clown shoes.

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Did you know that Egypt is actually on two different continents. If you look on a map it makes sense but I never really thought about it being in both Africa and Asia. I was in the Africa part, we pretty much traveled between Cairo and Aswan along the Nile.

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So I had taken the day off to recover from the flight from Egypt, pick up my mail, go to two doctor’s appointments that would be needed after the trip (allergy shot and to get my neck/back worked on) and other stuff. Since I got trapped in NY I had to move the allergy appointment but the other was later so that was okay. So I set the alarm clock for three hours later and took a nap. I ended up sleeping 11 hours, missing the appointment and now I’ve been wide awake for the last three hours. Although I did get the laundry done and watched a little TiVo, I hadn’t turned a TV on in weeks…

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So I’m finally back in Michigan! I will be posting more entries and photos over the next few weeks as I think of more things, finish thoughts I’ve started and mange to sort some photos.

I didn’t sleep well last night, so I made it to the airport on time. Although they did hit me with a $25 fee since my luggage weighed too much, I tried to sweet talk them out of that with the all the flight problems but no such luck. It was a tiny little plane and had a lot of tired familiar faces on it from last night.

I’m off to take a nap…

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It took them over three hours to decide to finally cancel our flight. That’s three hours after it was scheduled to depart, that’s not even factoring in that they had to have some idea there would be problems before the flight was even supposed to leave . We had a plane but no pilots, you’d think that wouldn’t be so hard to keep track of and keep us informed. I know I’m a little crabby from traveling but I’ve definitely been treated better than I was with the way the system worked tonight. If they would have canceled it hours before that I’d have been fine with it but I should have been home two hours ago and I’m just finally in a hotel. They’ve got free WiFi in the lobbys/resturants which is a bonus, but I’d rather have the A/C working…

Please let me clarify: I understand things can be beyond their control, but at 7:30 when they are telling us at when the pilots land at LaGuadia around 7:45 they’ll taxi over and it takes until 10 PM to tell us they can’t get pilots they don’t really care about the customers. All they have to do was keep us informed. If they would have told me at 8 I would have gladly went over to the hotel, ate and gone to bed. They just dragged it out and the story they gave us doesn’t make sense.

We didn’t get anything but a hotel room and a $7.00 voucher for dinner (that’s about 1/2 a burger at the hotel, everything at the airport was closed). Anyone have a good number or address at Delta for me to complain to? Please let me know. (Delta, if I misheard and there’s a free round-trip ticket in the mail for me, I’ll gladly correct this post…)

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