My favorite thing about driving from San Francisco to LA via the more inland route is how many strangely different types of country you drive through. There are grassy hills.
We all piled into a pickup truck taxi driven by a man everyone was (sort of?) friends with who claimed he was famous all over Egypt for his spectacular driving. (And by "spectacular" he meant "so fast and recklessly that you almost poop in your pants).
I ended up meeting a Belgian woman who was also looking to go to Dahab and the two of us found a driver who was willing to take us. The road from Sharm el-Sheikh to Dahab is through the mountainous desert and our driver pretty much drove over 120 MPH (no shit) the whole way there.
Bad ass. Ahmed and I had spent the hour-drive down doing our best to get to know each other. Despite the language barrier, we'd managed pretty well and I learned that despite having spent his entire life in Cairo, he'd never been to any of the sites we were visiting. It was cool to drive down the road with him and hear him having the same awed reaction as me.
This is the back of Djoser's Step Pyramid. It's from 2630 BCE (4,640 years ago!!!) and is considered one of the oldest stone monuments in human history.
Saqqara is a huge burial complex for the Old Kingdom of Egypt. We pulled off the lush green local roads and suddenly we were in the middle of a desert and there were two pyramids (well, one step pyramid and a pile of rubble!) rising out of the desert.
BTW, the pile of rubble is the remains of Userkaf's Pyramid! Guess that'll teach him to skimp on pyramid building supplies!
After finishing my breakfast, I grabbed my backpack and hit the streets of Cairo to try to find a driver! After a few failed attempts with drivers who spoke absolutely NO English, I finally met a driver who was willing to hear me out. Not that he spoke a single word of English either, he simply possessed enough patience to sit with me on the side of the road while I tried to communicate with a combination of phrases listed in the back of my guidebook and clumsy hand gestures.
After getting the gist that I wanted to hire him for the day, he told me that "We see friend with English." I agreed and he drove me to a hotel to visit a friend of his working as a security guard. His friend spoke great English and asked me where I wanted to go and how much I wanted to pay. I named the three cities and told him that I was offereing 200 EP (~$38 USD). He told me "Ahhhh! That is a very good and fair price!" He translated what I had just said for Ahmed, the driver, who happily agreed. After sitting in Cairo's morning traffic for close to an hour, we hit the highway and were on our way!
While Mer was taking pics of critters, I booked a day trip to go check out Chieow Laan Lake. A little past 9am, our guide showed up and we hopped into a pickup truck and headed towards the lake.
Driving back to Faisal's house we passed this huge mural of Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the current president of the UAE the ruler of Abu Dhabi. (Or at least I think that's him. Sometimes it's hard to tell with all the beards and headwear!)
After stuffing our faces, we hopped in the rental car and headed north on the parkway! We got back to NYC a little before 7pm! Thanks so much for inviting us out, Matt!
Atlantic City is like the 90% discount-version of Vegas. All the casinos are lumped together right next to one another with hundreds of pawn shops interspersed between them.
I had to check out of my hotel at noon and realized that I had seven hours to kill in the Greater Orlando area before I had to head to the airport to catch my flight. So I used the hotel lobby's wifi to do a little interweb research and was delighted to discover that Orlando is home to a Jesus-themed Christian amusement park called "THE HOLY LAND EXPERIENCE!"
I jotted down directions and hopped in my rental, giddy about the prospect of getting to play cultural anthropologist for the day hoping to observe the not-rare-enough species fundamentalignoramus americanus in its natural habitat!
I found the right exit off the highway, but then for the life of my couldn't find the place! I was pulled over in a strip mall parking lot trying to look at the tiny map that was in my rental car's glove compartment when I saw a minivan with a "BUSH CHENEY 04" bumper sticker. Half-kidding, I decided to follow it figuring it would lead me to the "promised land," and sure enough, I-shit-you-not...
...hopped in the car to have Christmas Dinner with the Carrick's (my cousins) and my mom's parents. As soon as we got into the car, my dad proudly queued up the mp3 Christmas Mix cd he'd created and proceeded to torture us for the entire drive down. I mean, c'mon! Track 34? Holy, Jesus! (Literally!)
On the drive north back to my parent's house, we stopped at someplace near the Garden State Arts Center (or whatever it's called these days) to check out some drive-through Holiday Lights show.
The place we'd booked to stay out was a gated-off resort-type place so we decided to rent a car because it would give us more freedom to explore the island. I'd driven on the left side of the road before and figured it would be no big deal. WRONG! Too bad no one told me that Jamaicans, who are reknowned around the world for getting high and being all friendly and "No problem, mon!" turn into crazy people as soon as they get behind the control on anything that has wheels a motor. Seriously, they are hands down the craziest drivers I've ever seen (and I grew up in NEW JERSEY!).
I drove Emily to the airport and we laughed about how Rt 80 runs all the way across the country and goes right through Succasunna, NJ, the town that we both grew up in.
Heading back home. (Home! Arrrrgh!) On the way home we stopped at a Rite-Aid looking to buy the game Scrabble. A few weeks prior, Meredith challenged me to play Scrabble online (I'd never played before!) and I ended up beating her - and she wanted a rematch! Anyway, in the store I noticed that...
Even after seeing it a bunch of times, the views are so beautiful that it literally makes you go "Whooooooa!" every time you see it. I managed to snap this pic of Mer mid-gasp.
After filling up, we drove back north into town, got some dinner and then went and saw Shaun of the Dead. And afterwards, we went to the Sony store and Meredith got herself...
Here's me picking her up at the airport. See how excited she is? I told you that my Nissan Sentra rental drives the bitches wild! After we'd caught up, I made good on something I'd been promising for weeks...
Hey look! Alysha's back in town! And she got a new car! Here she is taking us kids out for a spin in her fancy new Audi wagon that she found on eBay. (Who buys a car on the national interweb? We are living IN THE FUTURE!)
I woke up fully recovered on Wednesday just in time for my first day of work. Here's me on my very first commute down to our company's temporary offices at the VC firm that funded us.
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