New York Snow, 2-18-2006 Flight Snarled by New York Snow

By Bob Van Leer

(Gold Beach, Oregon, Saturday, Feb. 18, 2006) - Saturday, Feb. 11, we flew from Luxor on a short 50 minute flight to Cairo. From the air there is a ribbon of green along the Nile. Away from the Nile is a brown desert - no settlements, nothing. There is an occasional unpaved road over the brown hills and dry washes.

Over Cairo hangs a brown cloud of pollution. In 1952 the last of the Mohammed Ali line, King Farouk, was overthrown in a coup led by then-Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser who ruled from 1954 to 1970, the first two years behind a front-man General Naguib.

Nasser died and his successor was Anwar Sadat who was asassinated in 1981 for making peace with Israel.

Our guide, Hussein, said most Egyptians lived in apartments, rather than houses. An apartment in a good area costs 1000-1500 Egyptian pounds per square meter (about a square yard). A pound is about 5.7 to the dollar or worth about 17 cents. Payments are half down with the rest over 3-4 years. Apartments in a not so good area can be had with only 25% down and with 10-15 years to pay. Some subsidized housing is available with 20-30 year payout, but there are not enough available. Salaries are low, Hussein said a couple, both working, would make about 1000 pounds a month which he said is not enough on which to raise kids.

Another guide, commenting on being welcomed in Egypt said, your friends told you you were crazy to go to Egypt now, and there was a general agreement. But as I noted in earlier stories, we found absolutely no anti-Americanism in Egypt. Actually, it is the other way around. People we meet on the street would say, "American" and give a thumbs-up.

A sidelight, I asked about extra weight in our suitcases and Hussein said not to worry, EgyptAir doesn't care. It is a government airline and the extra weight is things we bought in Egypt and they would like to encourage more buying.
Some other comments, men who are close associates kiss one another on both cheeks in greeting one another. They shake hands with women. There is not much graffiti around Cairo, unlike large U. S. cities.

Sunday morning we were up at 5:00 a.m. to start the long flight home. The captain said the flight to JFK in New York was estimated at 11 hours and 40 minutes. A blizzard was being predicted in New York but we headed west anyway. Our route was farther north than coming over, we went over Athens, Italy, Paris, the southern tips of England and Ireland, then across the Atlantic and Labrador in Canada. The total round trip mileage, Gold Beach to Abu Simbel, was about 17,500 miles. The feature of the trip was a cruise on the Nile, but our total mileage on the river was only about 200. The riverboat was basically a floating hotel that moved a few miles and then tied up so we could see another temple. Egypt is roughly 670 miles north to south, and at Abu Simbel we were only about 20 miles from the Egypt-Sudan border.

As we approached the U. S. the pilot said JFK airport was closed by snow. We were diverted first to Montreal, then notified in flight to go to JFK. We circled there for an hour and were diverted to Dulles airport in Washington, D. C., where we landed about 4:00 p.m. local time. After about four hours on the ground we took off again for JFK and were able to land. All was confusion. The airport had been shut down for 24 hours with the biggest snowfall ever recorded for the time, 26.9 inches at Central Park. Half the airport staff hadn't made it in to work and flights were coming in as fast as they could be landed. Retrieving baggage took several hours. We finally got our bags at 1:00 a.m. eastern time Monday with our connecting flight long missed. We managed to get tickets on a 7:30 a.m. flight to San Francisco and there wasn't any point in leaving the airport.

The game plan had been to arrive in San Francisco in the evening, sleep in Monday morning and take an afternoon flight to Crescent City. The way it actually worked out was we got into San Francisco just in time to catch the Crescent City flight and never got to bed Sunday night at all. By the time we got to Gold Beach we had been up for 46 hours and were bushed. As always, these trips are interesting and educational but it nice to get home.
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