Marriott

As we drove into Aqaba after a long day in Wadi Rum, we saw a Safeway. We tend to visit grocery stores to buy drinks and snacks and it was pretty exciting to see a name like Safeway. Al Manara When planning this trip, we knew the stay in Aqaba needed to be a nice respite from camping in the desert of Wadi Rum. So we booked the ultra luxurious Al Manara by Marriott. It turned out to be even swankier than we anticipated. It was super nice and we got upgraded to a huge suite overlooking the bay. It’s the type of place that put a hand-written note, addressed to me, in our room before we got to it. And there was a big plate of really fancy sweets. I may have decided I love macaroons after that. Such a fun thing to have when you first walk in. ...

We flew on Egypt Air from Cairo to Amman this morning. The flight is just barely longer than an hour, but they still managed to do a full meal service. None of us were hungry, having already sat for a really good breakfast in the executive lounge at the Cairo Marriott earlier that morning. I can say without a doubt that the food options on our Egypt Air flights were definitely lower quality than all our other flights on the trip. ...

This is our first-ever trip to Egypt. When we originally started booking this trip we anticipated seeing more of Egypt, but the final plan put us in Cairo for only about 36 hours before continuing on to Jordan. We decided to sleep two nights at a hotel in Cairo, but it still felt a little bit like a really long layover. Going through customs and immigration in Cairo was super easy. We already had Egyptian e-Visas linked to our passports. The e-Visa program is pretty slick. And yet, getting out of the airport still felt like it took forever. That was all caused by the rate at which bags were delivered to baggage claim. It took nearly 30 minutes between the time our first bag came out until our final bag came out, and there were still lots of people from our flight waiting for their bags when we left the airport. It felt like no more than two bags ever came out at the same time. Sometimes it felt like several minutes between each small batch of bags - almost like a single person was carrying a bag in each hand from across the parking lot in order to get them on the conveyer belt. Maybe we were just really tired and that caused some time dilation, but it felt crazy slow. ...