Sharm El Sheikh or Bust!

It’s actually about as close to a ‘bust’ as a trip could come! I’m writing this from Amman, after two crazy days on the trip to nowhere. We left Sat. afternoon, literally dragging ourselves out the door because we were still tired from the Ball. I think we hit the road about three hours late! Arrived in Aqaba and relaxed for the evening only to wake up early the next morning for the drive to Egypt. If you’ve been following this blog for any period of time then you know how we hate border drama but always manage to find it. This day turned out to be no exception. Now keep in mind it is no EU, every time you enter or exit a border it takes at least 30 minutes of waiting around for the paperwork to be completed, also there are always long lines so we learned fast to do what the Arabs do, cut! Well, first we had to leave Jordan, then enter Israel, then drive 10min. along the Red Sea coast to exit Israel, and then officially enter Egypt. At this point, I was thinking, wow, it’s been less than two hours – this is going too well, we may be at Mt. Sinai by 3:00…it figures, at this point we hit our roadblock!

Egypt would not let us drive our car to Sharm without trip insurance that had to be purchased in Israel. (Mind you, we’ve already spent $100 in Israel to insure our car to drive the few mile distance between Egypt and Jordan) we had no idea that Egypt needed insurance too- this was some sort of a new rule. SO- we depart Egypt in order to ask Israel customs a quick (2min.) question about where to purchase this insurance. We asked our question and they told us that we could only purchase the insurance in Tel Aviv (which we were not about to drive to Tel Aviv) SO it was back to Egypt to see if we could bribe the customs agent. Unfortunately, before they let us leave again (to go about 100 ft to the Egyptian side) we had to officially reenter and then exit Israel AGAIN. I can’t even begin to say how annoying this was, especially when the passport people had just seen us an hour before and we had go into the whole story about 10 different times! Then, to our dismay, we found one of the few Egyptian gov’t officials who could not be bribed and we were given a no-go from customs. So, exit Egypt, reenter Israel, drive 10 min., exit Israel and reenter Jordan… All of this wasted probably 5-6 hours and the furthest we traveled was 6 miles (three countries in 6 miles, pretty good!) At least everyone at the border was very nice to us, we must have been asked about Obama a dozen times… he’s getting lots of smiles and thumbs up in this part of the world, Ha! So far, just a typical day in the life of a FAO family.

At this point, we decide to hurry back to Amman and buy tickets to fly to Sharm instead. We take off in a hurry because we didn’t want to be caught driving after dark. We forgot that it gets dark at about 4:30 pm now and ended up driving half the way in the dark. Now we know why they say not to drive after dark! For one thing, everyone keeps their brights on… plus you are always watching out for people and animals to cross the road along with all of the usual crazy driving. K also decided that she had had enough and was miserable for most of the trip back home. Couldn’t blame her, it was a crappy day for all of us! Thank goodness, some nice Christian missionaries at the Israeli border gave us a bag of candy and suckers; I don’t think she (or us) could have made the trip home without those suckers to keep her quiet.

We finally get home safely (Thank God) and find out that plane tickets for K and I are going to cost $600 for a last minute trip BUT we could take the ferry from Aqaba over for only $300. Crap! Now we needed to head BACK to Aqaba where we had just left and had a miserable trip home. We debated all night whether to scrap the trip, drive back down to Aqaba early and catch the ferry (why in the world didn’t we just stay down there in the first place?!) or fork out the $600 and buy plane tickets. Ahh, what to do?! If it were just us, we would have driven back down, catch the ferry, and save a few bucks but we just couldn’t force another long car trip on K. Given our motto to “seize the day” I really hated to scrap the trip (and the incredible resort there just waiting for us!) so we forked out the cash today for the plane tickets and fly out tomorrow morning for four nights. As much as I hate to miss an opportunity for adventure, I also hate to waste money so it looks like I broke even on this trip! Now we’re just hoping we made the right decision and have a great five days in Sharm…. It had better be worth all the DRAMA!!! :)

THANKFULLY, spending today back in Amman allowed us to take care of a few business things we needed to do, including FINALLY getting our plane tickets back to the States. We officially leave Amman (with heavy hearts) on Dec. 2. We’ll be in the UK visiting our new niece and some friends until the 7th of Dec. Then we fly to DC to house hunt until the 13th. Then we fly to MN where J will be until Jan. 2 (he starts school on the 5th) and K and I will leave MN on the 15th on Jan. (Yay, over a month back home to catch up with family!) We’ll make it back to DC in time for the Inauguration, I read that hotel rooms are a hot commodity in DC that week so feel free to come stay with us if you’re interested… That is, if we actually have a house by that point! :) To all our pals in DC and MN, we cannot wait to catch up with you in person!!!!

Okay, time to get repacking….. like I said, Sharm El Sheikh or BUST!