A Wonderful Experience

My husband, youngest son and I at the top.

This is what it looked like from the top no matter which way you looked. Amazing, huh?

And finally, another picture of me, at the top.

This past weekend, my husband, son and I got to experience something wonderful. If you live in Egypt or plan to visit, one thing that is a must is to be able to climb Mt. Sinai. We have lived in Egypt for 8 years now and have always planned on doing this, but for some reason we put it off till now. I will tell you it was not an easy experience, and along the way I had my doubts I would make it all the way to the top, but I can be pretty determined at times. So, I just kept pushing and pushing till finally, I was at the top. They say, it usually takes people 2-4 hours to reach the top, and it took me 3. Then we spent 30-45 minutes at the top before we began our descent, whick took 2 hours. So all in all it took us about 6 hours. Boy were we exhausted and ready to go to bed.

There are two ways to get up the mountain. One of them is a "camel path" that you can walk or ride a camel up, and we chose to walk. It is a 3-mile long path, with plenty of twists and turns and some obstacles (such as big stones) in your way. Then there is the wind and the cold. The wind, at times, was horrendous, and the farther up you got, the colder it got. The other way to get up the mountain is by steps. We did not take this way, so I do not know much about it, but I do know there are 3,750 steps. Like I said, I don't know much about this way, so I don't know if it would be easier or harder. Maybe, (and that's a big maybe) if we ever decide to go back we will try the stairs and be able to compare the two paths. In all probability though, if we ever decide to go back, we will probably ride the camels. ;o)

For right now I'm just going to post a few pictures of our wonderful experience, and I will save some of the other exciting information about the whole experience for future posts.

A 5K in the Desert

This picture helps you to visualize the mountains and the landscape.

Here you can see the road that we ran on. In this particular area, the road looks quite nice.

This is a good friend of mine and me, just after finishing the race.

I know it has been quite a long time since I posted, but I thought I would try to get my blog going again. For right now, I am going to try to post at least once a week, and hopefully, once the school year is over, I hope to be posting a lot more than that.

This past weekend was our school's annual "Run in the Desert". Our school coordinates it and we have a couple of schools and a couple of churches that participate. The younger kids run a 2K, while the older kids and adults run a 5K. The area we have it is called Wadi Digla. A "wadi" is a valley, and this particular valley just happens to be desert. As you can see from the pictures, there is lots of sand and rocks, surrounded on both sides by mountains.

The "race track" happens to be a road that runs right down the middle of the wadi. It is really rough running because there are rocks and bumps all over the place. Another difficult thing is when the wind blows. You have to be careful when this happens because the sand will blow right into your face, and boy does the wind blow.

This is the first year I have taken part in the race. I really was not sure, right up to the time the race was about to start, that I was going to run. But, I got in with the crowd, and before I knew it, I was running/walking right along with them. I am really glad that I did. I found out that it actually wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, and I actually enjoyed it. I don't know my actual time, but I know I came in 4th out of the 5 women that were in my age bracket. I'm hoping to be in better condition next year and run again, and who knows, maybe I could even win a medal.