SIX FROM U.S. GO ON TRIP
By Bob Van Leer

  (CAIRO, EGYPT, March 18, 1989) - Our Air Egypt Boeing 747 landed today at the Cairo airport. ending a journey that took two days and brought me nearly half way around the world from Gold Beach. It's 11 p.m. in Cairo as this is written, but the time is only one in the afternoon at home.

   This evening we had a briefing on the coming week's activities from our program coordinator, Dr. Said Seif-Elyazal at our hotel, the Heliopolis Sheraton and then dined on prawns fresh from the Red Sea.

  I left Gold Beach Thursday afternoon in a rainstorm and found snow on Oregon Mountain. At Cave Junction I stopped briefly to visit Bob Rodriguez. former publisher of the Brookings Curry Coastal Pilot and now owner of the Illinois Valley News. He put in a new Macintosh computer system a little before we did and I wanted to compare some notes. At Medford I had dinner with Steve and Mary Ryder.

  He came to Oregon as publisher of the Medford Mail- Tribune after it was acquired by Ottaway Newspapers, a subsidiary of Dow-Jones.

  Since then he has been moved up to overall charge of all of the chain's western newspapers but still maintains an office in Medford. 

 Early Morning Flight
  At 6:40 a.m. Friday, March 17, I boarded the flight that would end in Cairo. The route was Medford to San Francisco and non-stop to New York. At John F. Kennedy airport I teamed up with four other members of our party of six. They are; Lee Gray, Raytown, Mo.; Jay Griggs, Hudson, Wis.;
Phil Swift, Wickenburg, Ariz.; and Ken Rhoades, Blair,Neb. The sixth member of our party, Don Smith, Monticello, Minn., caught an earlier flight and joined us in Cairo. All are experienced weekly editors and publishers.

   Even on a national basis the weekly newspaper business is a fairly close knit group. Rhoades was with the group tour that Betty and I took last year to Australia. Griggs did graduate work at the University of Oregon School of Journalism at Eugene in the late 1970s and spent a week interning at the Brookings-Harbor Pilot. He stopped at our office in Gold Beach then. Smith's father, publisher before him, and now mostly retired, has a hobby of collecting old wood type and once stopped at our office trying to buy some. Swift used to work at Chico, Ca. and drove through Gold Beach more than Once vacationing. Incidentally, the owner of the paper that Swift edits is Vice Pres. Dan Quayle' s younger brother Al1 the flights were uneventful and on time except our plane was delayed in Paris an hour waiting for three busloads of U. S. tourists. On United Airlines flights from Medford and San Francisco, I had enough Frequent Flyer miles built up so I was upgraded to First Class. The seats are wider the and service better, but not enough to pay the extra cost if I was using cash.

  I had to get to New york at my own expense, but from there we were guests of the American Egyptian Cooperation Foundation. We boarded an Egypt Air 747 for the long trip to Cairo and curiously, all of us except Rhoades, our delegation leader, were seated in who upper deck of the plane in First Class. Our leader was on the main deck in the coach seating with a load of college youths going to Paris for spring break. They were too excited to sleep and wouldn't let him sleep either.

 Serves No Alcohol
  Egypt Air follows Moslem tradition and doesn't serve anything alcoholic on the plane. However, just before we boarded each passenger was handed a carton of two small bottles of French wine to take aboard ''for your meal".

   We left JFK at 10 p.m., with our route taking us across Cape Cod and Gander, Newfoundland, before heading across the Atlantic. We passed just south of Ireland and England, crossing the French coast south of Normandy.

  Our plane landed in Paris but the stop was only scheduled for an hour and we were not allowed off the plane. Taking off, we had a distant view of the Eiffel Tower. We crossed northern Italy and flew down the Italian coast in clouds which broke just enough to give us a view of Rome, Naples and Capri.

  Much of the Egyptian Western Desert is the Hollywood version of a desert - nothing - just blowing sand. The terrain is so bleak it makes Nevada look lush and green.

  Then we came to Cairo and the Nile and we saw the narrow ribbon of green along the Nile that has supported civilization for thousands of years. The total hours in flight of all flights was 16.

  Tomorrow our day begins with a meeting with Frank G. Wizner, U. S. Ambassador to Egypt, followed by visits to the National Museum, the Citadel, and the Khan E1 Khalili Bazaar.