Dear Friends,

It's hard to believe that in a couple days we'll have been home from Egypt for almost 2 months. WOW. We've had so much to do and life has been so full that in some ways it seems like it's been a year or so since we were in Egypt. In other ways it seems like I'm still there. Egypt becomes a part of you it seems.

More for myself than for anyone else, I'm going to continue this blog so that I have a place to have some of my photos and a description of what they are about.

It looks like my last post was while we were still in Cairo.

We left Cairo on Wednesday, January 7 and headed south towards Luxor.  This total drive would be Cairo to Minya (155 miles), Minya to Asyut (75 miles), Asyut to Luxor (200 miles), then after our Nile Cruise and our Lake Nassar Cruise, we'd drive from Aswan to Luxor (about 81 miles). That means that we'll have driven about 510 miles along the Nile.  Neat!

Anyway, on our way south, we passed Saquarra, and were driving with just sand desert on both sides of the van (we had in the van Lea, Stuart, Ahmet our great guide, Mahmoot our wonderful driver, myself, and a tourist police officer. We were led by a jeep with a driver and a person beside him and 2-3 people in the back of the covered jeep who each had a machine gun. We felt safe and a bit conspicuous.

As we drove along, I noticed a large outcropping in the distance. It looked a lot like Devils

 Rock out west. I pointed it out (there's a photo below of when we got a bit closer). Ahmet didn't

 seem like it was anything special. Then we turned off onto a smaller road and started driving toward this neat outcropping. As we got closer we could tell it wasn't a natural formation, it was a pyramid!

 

We were seeing Meidum Pyramid from a

 distance.

 

You'll see a couple photos of the pyramid, the guard shack 

and the "lesser tombs" in the human-made mound nearby. 

I'll see if I can put a video on this

 to also give an idea of the size of this neat place.

We were here for a while and then headed south towards Minya.

I'll end this post here and add the photos.

Love,

Frank