Hello readers. The flight over was fine, just very cramped for 10+ hours. EgyptAir has a camera in the nose of their jet that let us see the airport as we landed. The drive from Cairo to the Faiyum took about two hours. On the way we passed the pyramids, which certainly are big, but I did not get a good look at them.

We arrived in the Faiyum area after dark, so I did not see much of it either, until about noon today, when I went up on top of our base camp building and took some photos. Here's a QuickTime panorama of the Faiyum shot from the roof (1.7 MB).

A couple more photos follow, which are the base camp building from the front, the same building from the side showing the showers, some of our tents, and the larger dining tent with the lake in the background.

So far today has consisted of getting our new Windows XP system up and running so that it can be used to enter data about the excavations and finds when people get back from the field in the early afternoon. So far, so good. The scanner and printer are working well, and the software has no problems. It's quite warm through the day and the flies are annoying at lunch, but at least the mosquitos are not as bad as I expected: last night only about six came around.