A Trip 26 years in the making.....

When I was in my early 20’s and had just started working full time, I came across an advertisement for a Contiki cruise on the Nile and it set my imagination on fire.  I loved history, so much so that it was my undergrad major in university!  I immediately started to save and had the best of intentions on going…….that was, until I met a guy, who very quickly became THE guy and after 8-months of on and off again dating and a year of being engaged, became The Husband!   And like most young couples, then came the babies, and the bills and before I knew it, I was too old for Contiki……. <big sigh>!!!

Fast forward to 2018 and “the husband” and I had started to cruise and we came across an itinerary with Regent Seven Seas that started in Dubai and ended in Rome.  It included two days in Egypt and a day in Jordan and we immediately booked it.  My dream was coming true!   

We lost weekends watching every YouTube video that we could on the region, the cruise line and on every location that each shore excursion went to, painstakingly narrowing down and eventually making the decision as to exactly which shore excursions we would do.   It was going to be perfect and my Egyptian dream was going to come true……We even arranged the air portion, flying on the A380 in business class with Emirates, directly from Toronto.  I was as excited about the air portion as I was about the entire trip and we began to get ready to sail on April 16th, 2020……

I don’t even need to write this next paragraph, as you know what happened.  I was heartbroken…..but in the grand scheme of what we all learned in 2020, it wasn’t the end of the world.

So, we rebooked the same itinerary for October 2021…..and it ended up with the same fate…..as did a land-only excursion that we had booked and watched as countries opened and closed again and we decided to wait, fearing that we would get to Egypt and find that Jordan had closed its doors.

In mid 2022 after I started my career as a Travel Advisor (albeit part time at that point!) one of the first trips that we booked was our Egyptian Odyssey! We chose this time to do a river cruise with Viking, deciding that the itinerary (two days in Cairo, a week on the Nile from Luxor to Aswan and back, a day back in Cairo and then four-day post trip in Jordan) would enable us to see much more of Egypt and more of Jordan than we could do via an ocean cruise.  

I was so in-love with the air portion of our original trip that we dropped the Viking air (they wouldn’t allow us to deviate on this cruise) and booked our own air.  This meant that we were flying into Dubai, so I quickly put together a week customized “pre-cruise” for us, and then we flew to Cairo (also with Emirates on the A380…..we actually did four flights on this aircraft with Emirates, all in business class on this trip and it really was spectacular!).

There were a lot of things to navigate along the way….the worst of which was the change to the Visa requirements for Canadians to go to Egypt, just a few months before our trip.  There was so much confusion around the process, no one was answering the phone or responding to emails and we ended up driving to Montreal on Boxing Day to be at the Consulate when it opened on the 27th (just 13 days before our flight) to beg them to process our visas.  Fortunately it worked!

Our trip to Egypt was incredible.  The itinerary was spectacular and no, we didn’t ever get “templed out”!  We saw both the pyramids at Giza as well as the Saqqara pyramids.  We took a hot air balloon ride over the Valley of the Kings at sunrise (the absolute highlight of our trip) and we also did the side trip to Abu Simbel to see the temple that was moved to avoid being lost after the Aswan Dam was built and areas were flooded.  

All in all this was an incredible trip and worth the wait!  The one thing that we had to remind ourselves over and over again, was just how old everything was.  It really was hard to get our heads around the fact that we were walking on steps that ancient Egyptians had walked on, over 5,000 years ago.  It really was surreal.