This entry is just to let everyone know that the flight home happened and all is well. I will post a few more journal entries over the next day or two to complete this site.

But to bring you up-to-date on the flight situation, here's what happened.

We went back to the EgyptAir office at 6 pm on Thursday only to be told that they still could not determine which flight we'd be on. We had confirmed seats on the 2nd at 1:30 am, with an uncertain connection from either JFK, La Guardia, or Newark (!!) but had (according to them) a "good" chance of getting on our original flight on Friday at 9 am if we got ourselves to the airport around 6 am.

So we pretty much decided to try for our orginal flight, and if it didn't work out then we'd leave our bags somewhere at the airport and catch a taxi back to Cairo and spend another day in town.

And then we went shopping at the Khan al-Khalili (see separate journal entry for that).

Later that night we decided to check with the airline again to see how many people were on the waiting list for our original flight, and not bother trying if there were a whole lot of them. They told us we were the only ones on the list, so we decided to get up at 5:00 am and go to the airport, after going out for a last drink with the group and getting back to the hotel at 1:00 am.

As it turns out, we did catch our Friday morning flight. Not only that, but there were AT LEAST 15 empty seats in our area of the plane!!! It's such lame BS that they put us through with this reconformation process and rescheduling and hassle, only to fly the plane with so many empty seats. Perhaps they all belonged to people who did not reconfirm in time and got bumped to some other plane and didn't bother to try for their original flight.

We arrived at JFK after an 11-hour flight and the nice people at United offered to advance me up a flight (and Tom up two flights) to a 4:15 pm plane to LAX so we jumped on that. Unfortuately, despite numerous attempts to use various phones, I could not contact Shelley to let her know not only that we made the original EgyptAir flight nor the earlier United one.

I had no cash for a phone call, could not call her cell phone collect (feature disabled), could not call her WB office collect (did not know office number), could not bill to our home number (no one there to accept the charges), could not find an Internet terminal at the airport, and my credit card was not accepted for phone calls (reported as declined, but it worked fine for food), and (finally) the AirPhones on the plane apparently did not work -- they just sat there trying to get their calls through, and the flight attendants had no useful suggestions.

But Shelley - despite going into worry mode - called United and found out my flight and was there to meet me at the airport. So home again, home again, and glad to be here.