Dad ended his work early so I get the 14 minutes left on our hour. You have to buy an internet card from the hotel <if they have internet> for an exhorbitant fee each half hour or hour. Of course there's a jillion internet cafe's, but this kind of touring doesn't lend itself to a leisurely stop to compose and sip a latte. ;)

We've been doing our usual going, going, going the last several days. Jordan was wonderful! Much more beautiful than I'd pictured. For some reason I had desert, desert everywhere in my head, but we drove through a lot of green mountains. We did drive through some desert on our way to Aqaba which is where we caught the boat over to Egypt. For those of you on the short term committee, Mom and I came up with a new training scenario: Egyptian Border Crossing. I'm going to blog about it, but not until I'm out of the country...

Luxor was so hot today I can't imagine what it's like in the summer <our guide told us they tour from 5:30a-10a then>. We were literally dripping with sweat as we explored some of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings at 8 o'clock this morning. Our ticket gained us entry to three of the 60-some-odd tombs and they were increasingly humid and stuffy -- though interesting! We saw a couple more temples, the Valley of the Workers, Karnak <which I plan to write about in detail later> and ended the day with an hour's sail on the Nile that was fairly peaceful except for every time we floated past a generator pumping water out for the fields. :)

Only about half of the group took this side excursion so we'll hook up with everyone again tomorrow. We're sitting in a hotel lobby waiting for our pickup at 10p, then we'll wait in the airport until our midnight flight. This morning we flew down with a huge group of grade school kids from Qatar. Lots of interesting accents among teachers and students.

Oops! Times almost out so I better publish before I lose it all. I doubt I'll be able to post for a few more days til I'm situated in the next country.