Every trip we've shared since 2011—filter by where we went, when we traveled, or what we explored.
Showing 18 of 236 posts
EgyptThere is a part of our Middle East journey we never told at the time, the one moment of the whole trip we can explain only as the hand of God. It happened at the Hanging Church in Old Cairo, when John went suddenly faint and a priest named Father John appeared to pray over him, and it deepened into something we still cannot account for when we returned weeks later to give thanks.
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EgyptOur last full day in Egypt, in Cairo with our guide and friend Sam. The Egyptian Museum, the Rosetta Stone that unlocked the hieroglyphs, the Narmer Palette, and the treasures of Tutankhamun. Then the old Christian quarter of Coptic Cairo: the founding of the Coptic Church by St. Mark, the cave where the Holy Family sheltered, and the Hanging Church. A blessing from Father Jacob, a goodbye to Sam, and a story we have saved for its own telling.
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EgyptBack in Cairo after the cruise, we drove up to Alexandria, the Paris of antiquity, where Egyptian, Greek, and Roman worlds meet. Down in the catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa, one of the Seven Wonders of the medieval world, the three cultures are carved into a single stone. Then Pompey's Pillar, and the old and new libraries of Alexandria.
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OmanThe last leg of the cruise, ashore on the Arabian coast. Muscat and the vast Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, the Sultan's Palace and the old Al Mirani Fort, and one of the largest private yachts in the world. Abu Dhabi from the top of a sightseeing bus, all gleaming and new. And Dubai, where we said our goodbyes, skipped the city over a vaccine rule, and flew back to Cairo.
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JordanA short call at Aqaba, Jordan's one seaport, and a reminder of how glad we were to have given Petra a proper visit weeks before, while shipmates got only two rushed hours. Then four days at sea, down the Red Sea and out into the pirate waters of the Gulf of Aden: the Martini Bar that became 'our bar,' the crew's Covid stories, two fine couples, and a boat in the night that gave everyone a fright.
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EgyptA day off the ship at Safaga, driven inland to Luxor, the ancient Thebes. The vast temple of Karnak with its avenue of rams and its Great Hypostyle Hall, the remarkable story of the pharaoh Hatshepsut, a boat across the Nile, and the painted tombs of the Valley of the Kings, where Janice walked the ledge into the burial chamber of Merneptah.
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IsraelA new corner of Israel at Haifa: the closed Bahá'í gardens, the Byzantine mosaics at Shavei Tzion, and Rosh Hanikra, where the world's steepest cable car drops to the sea grottos on the Lebanese border. John's leg, skinned in Wadi Rum, kept us aboard rather than bound for Jerusalem. Then south to Egypt and a long day's sail through the Suez Canal, under the great bridge to the Sinai.
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GreeceThe land half of the journey behind us, we flew from Cairo to Athens to begin the cruise we had planned for years, from Greece all the way to Dubai. Two days at Piraeus and its bitter orange trees, then aboard the Norwegian Jade to our first stop in Turkey: the House of the Virgin Mary, the vast Roman ruins of Ephesus with its Library of Celsus and great theater, and the lone surviving column of the Temple of Artemis.
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EgyptSouth of Giza to an older Egypt: Saqqara, with the oldest stone building complex on earth. The climb down into the tomb of Teti and its Pyramid Texts, Djoser's step pyramid and its great colonnade, then Memphis, first capital of a united Egypt, and the open-air museum at Mit Rahina with its Alabaster Sphinx and the fallen colossus of Ramses the Great.
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EgyptInto Cairo and across the Nile to Giza, in the shadow of the Great Pyramid, with a night at the historic Mena House. Our guide Sam at the Giza necropolis, the Great Pyramid of Khufu, a camel ride on the sand, the Great Sphinx, and Sam's own account, as a Coptic Christian, of the long story of the Christians of Egypt.
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JordanThe last day in Jordan, and the one we'd had to wait for. Mount Nebo, where Moses looked out over the Promised Land he would never enter, with its ancient memorial church and Fantoni's serpent cross. Then Madaba, the city of mosaics, and its great treasure, the sixth-century Madaba Map, the oldest surviving map of the Holy Land. A mosaic table bound for home, and a warm goodbye to Hasan.
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JordanSouth from Petra into the red desert of Wadi Rum, the Valley of the Moon, for a night in a Bedouin camp. A ride in the back of a 4x4, the ancient carvings of Khazali, a skinned leg and two good Samaritans, a fine desert sunset, and a very cold tent with no heat until next month.
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JordanPast the Treasury, the canyon opens and the real scale of Petra appears: the Street of Facades, the great rock-cut theater, the Royal Tombs glowing on the eastern cliffs, and the temple of Qasr al-Bint at the far end. Most of the city is still buried, and getting back out meant a five-mile day, a long uphill climb, and a pair of donkeys.
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JordanThe morning we had been waiting for. Petra, the lost city of the Nabateans, rediscovered for the West in 1812, with our guide Mariam, the first Bedouin woman to guide there. We walked down the long canyon of the Siq, past the dams and carvings, to the moment everyone comes for: the Treasury revealed at the end of the slot, the rose-red facade that Indiana Jones made famous.
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JordanA tribal feud closed the road to Mount Nebo, so Hasan turned us toward Amman and the south. We climbed the Citadel for the Temple of Hercules and the Roman theater below it, heard a Muslim Brotherhood protest rise up the hill, then drove down to the Crusader fortress of Shobak, hidden in the rock, before a Palestinian feast on the way to Petra.
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JordanThe Middle East had been on our list for years, and Janice finally built the trip. Flying first and business class out of Los Angeles by way of London and Cairo into Amman, we met our guide Hasan and spent our first day at Jerash, one of the best-preserved Roman cities anywhere, often called the Pompeii of the East. Then a Jordanian feast in Amman and a night on the shore of the Dead Sea, with the lights of Israel across the water.
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Cruising(/images/2022/ship.jpeg)The picture was taken from a Hill in St. Lucia. We left home and headed to Orlando airport to board a plane for Puerto Rico for a day of sightseeing and where we would board the Norwegian Epic ...
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CaribbeanOne of the first cruises after COVID nearly sank the whole industry, which made for a comedy of dos and don'ts: three negative tests just to board, a ship built for forty-two hundred carrying a thousand, and islands where you couldn't step off the boat without a chaperone. From Old San Juan and its great Spanish fort out to St. Thomas, St. Maarten, Antigua, Barbados, St. Lucia, and St. Kitts, with monkeys, a water slide, an America's Cup memory, and a lot of shuttered shops we hope reopen soon.
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