Back to Egypt

Well it was a wonderful summer being back home in the states. We got to enjoy lots of time with almost all of our family and a few friends. We filled up our bellies with lots of good American food and our suitcases with lots of new clothes and Crystal Lite. But now it’s time to head back to our other home in Egypt and get ready for another school year.

We left Kansas City on August 13^th at 11:00 am and headed to Washington D.C. We followed Kristal’s dad who had left at 7:00 that same morning to catch his connecting flight in Washington D.C. for his business trip to China. He’ll be there for three weeks. The following day Kristal’s mom flew to New York to help her brother move from Texas to Horse Heads, NY. I know what you all are thinking, us Brady’s are hard to keep track of and we never stay in one state long much less on the same continent together.

From Washington D.C. we flew to Frankfurt, Germany and then to Cairo, Egypt and met the school van to drive us to Alexandria. It took a total of 32 hours from door step to door step.

Poor Sokkwi was in his cat carrier for that whole time. But once again he surprised me with how good of a traveler he is for a cat. I think it’s pretty awesome when we can be seven hours into a nine hour flight until the people around us ask, “Is there a cat under there?” and even, when he does meow he usually is happy and quite if we slip our hand into his carrier and pet him for awhile. We’ve been truly blessed on all our travels so far and always manage to sit next to people who like cats and are always interested in Sokkwi. The flight attendants are always happy to give us an extra cup of water for him and we’ll give him a couple handfuls of food to munch on in his carrier throughout his trip. On our layovers, I will find a family restroom that is a single room so that I lock the door and let him and out stretch for awhile. We’ve worked out a great system with a Ziploc bag of kitty litter and small Rubber Maid container that he can use the litter box.

We meet our good friends Joseph and Lianne in Frankfurt and were very excited to see them and catch up. The more we talked with them the more excited we were to get home and see the rest of our “Schutz Family” and meet the new staff for the year.

Somehow we lucked out and got bumped to First Class for our flight from Germany to Egypt. Neither of us had ever flown first class before and I don’t know if we can ever go back to economy again. It was such a luxury to be able to stretch out and be totally comfortable and pampered during such a long trip. But of course, it had to be the worst that Sokkwi had ever been while traveling and wouldn’t stop meowing unless I had him in my lap and begged him to be quite because I didn’t want to get kicked out of first class. I think the problem was that they were serving fish and he really wanted some.

I thought I might take some time to get reaccelerated to the driving and noise in Egypt, but surprisingly it felt like we hadn’t been gone long at all and we both truly got that warm fuzzy feeling of “coming home.”

We had chosen to move into a new apartment this year. It’s bigger with two bedrooms and a much nicer kitchen. We spent the first two days unpacking while Sokkwi ran from one end to the next non-stop to stretch his legs. I’ll post pictures of our new apartment soon.