Our visas expired just before Christmas. So we had to leave the country and re-enter. Egypt happened to be the cheapest tickets.
It was magnificent!! The word of the trip was EPIC! Egypt is amazing in so many ways. And it’s real. There is beauty and 5,000-year-old ruins every where you turn. The history and magnificence of the culture is really astounding.
The difficulty is that everything is tainted with pagan worship and idolatry. So, we tried to strike the difficult balance between giving praise to God for the culture and beauty and celebrating pagan rebellion against Yahweh. I think we managed and had the time of our lives.
One of the biggest highlights was a candle-lit Christmas Eve service. Held outdoors in the streets of Cairo, it truly felt as though we were present in the culture on night of our Savior’s birth. Our pictures, of course, cannot capture how special it really was.
TOP: It wasn’t exactly a snowy Christmas, but we made the best of it.
RIGHT: The view out our hotel was beautiful.
Our Christmas evening was spent on a felucca boat cruising the Nile river. The same river Moses was left in. Our meal was a smorgasbord of traditional Egyptian food. The boat ride ended up turning into a Karaoke party. At first the conductor was playing English music we would consider inappropriate for a Christian family, but he let us pick the songs and it turned into a Christimas wonderland.
The meal was traditional Egyptian food which consisted of kebabs and kofta, warak enab, baba ganoush, humus, aish baladi, and other delish foods. The also serve fermented egg plant which none of us really enjoyed. 
BELOW: On the way to the pyramids, we all piled in a horse cart. Through the streets of Egypt in a one horse carriage, we sang our own “Egyptian” version of Jingle Bells.
The landscape is filled with the outlines of mosques, churches, and citadels. Most range from 100s to 1000s of years old. Yet, it’s part of normal life in Cairo.
LEFT: One of the very first highlights was Starbucks! It had been 6 months since our last taste.
BELOW: Our family took an epic 1hr camel, horse, and carriage ride to the pyramids through the desert.
Nothing can prepare you for the enormity of the pyramids. They always looks small in pictures because people have to stand so far in front of them to fit them in the frame.
But this is the size of just one layer! In credible.
Visiting the Coptic Cave Churches of Egypt
Travelers navigate the “garbage city” in order to get to the cave churches.
The artwork was truly beautiful. Mega-churches would be proud of their marketing, since you can literally zipline right over the massive cave chapel! I’m not sure how Christ would feel about it though.
America Day
The girls took a day, while I went dirt-biking, to go to a massive mall (similar to Mall of America). It included hundreds of “American” stores. They visited Starbucks, American Eagle, and many others.
But the highlight was probably the huge playground, trampoline park, and SNOW ZONE! They were able to snowball fight, go tubing, ice bumper cars, and have fun in the snow. How cool!
Dirt Biking in the Desert
Matthew also had the bucket-list experience of riding dirt bike through the desert dunes and mountains.
