A View of Luxor

Trust us, we have written lovely accounts of our trip. Just promise to check back in the next day to see them, once we have solved our Microsoft issues. This first photo shows us in front of our cruise ship. There were only 14 passengers on the boat, since there are very few people who willingly come to Egypt to tour along the Nile this time of year. That is not Jim standing next to Craig but one of the awesome crew members. This is the open air cafe where Craig and Jim caught some World Cup action while taking a break from touring ancient temples and tombs. Note the colorful "roof" and the little bitty television.

Here's Craig during our World Cup viewing. Later you will read stories about our wild horse carriage ridges through Luxor. We caught the rides just outside this cafe.

Here we are in our killer day touring Luxor. We are in the Valley of the Workers. We saw two incredible tombs here. We were the only tourists there when we visited. Talk about one on one attention from the special guides who were always looking for "bakshesh" or tips. In the top of the photo are the ruins of the worker villiages. These workers built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens.

After touring four tombs at the Valley of the Kings (including King Tut's, of course), and seeing the Valley of the Workers, we made a quick stop at the Collosi of Memnon. Even though the picture shows just one Collossus, there are actually two side by side. They are said to have been the statues marking the entrance of a huge temple which was destroyed by the earthquake of 27 BC (don't quote me on that date!)

Did I mention it was hot? Our guide said it was 50 degrees Celcius. You all can do the conversion. Trust us, it was toasty. Here we are climbing the steps to the Queen Hatchseput temple.

This is Nancy and Craig peering into pit in front of the temple. As big as the Queen H temple is, there is another temple right next to it, in ruins, that they are beginning to restore.Here we are strolling down the Avenue of Spinxes toward into biggest temple in the world, Karnak. Nancy and Jacob say "wow" in the Hypostyle Hall. In this room a historic event happen, which is we believe the guide actually corrected Jacob on one of his facts. Otherwise Jacob was pretty much unblemished in his Egyptian knowledge for the day. Jacob stops for a moment in the shade by the smallest statue of Ramesses II were could find in Luxor. Ramsses II was the man of the century way back when, and ruled for over 60 years. Whenever you see a huge statue of someone in Egypt, you can guess it's Ramesses II.Now we have moved "next door" to Luxor Temple. Next door means three kilometers away. There is a huge project in Luxor to tear down all the buildings along the avenue connecting the two temples, restoring the area to how it was back in the day.

Before we moved on to the Red Sea and Hurgada, our guide took us to McDonalds. It was just as cool as a McDs in America and when we stepped through the door we all went "ahhhhh".

Everyone else ordered boring stuff like hamburgers but Jim stepped up to the challenge and got a "McArabia" sandwich, which was like a falafale and quite tasty!