In March 2020, my now ex-husband and I spent more than 24 hours traveling back from Cairo, Egypt to Chicago.

We had missed our flight on Friday due to a freak sandstorm that kept us in Luxor for another 24-hours. By the time we left on Saturday, we were stressed out and just wanting to get home.

Nothing had changed in the 15 days we’d been gone…except everything.

Along with our fellow travelers, we’d been keeping up with the breaking news about what was happening in the U.S. but we’d all decided that there wasn’t much we could do about it so we might as well just enjoy our Viking cruise on the Nile.

The crew was taking our temperatures twice a day and squirting our hands with sanitizer every time we came back on board. No one was showing any signs of being sick — that we knew of.

No News is Good News

For much of the trip, I’d been unable to get my emails due to the spotty WiFi on the ship. And I’d been too cheap to pay for international data coverage in Egypt.  I figured I’d just disconnect, like I do on all the international vacations we take.

But lots of other people on our cruise did not disconnect.  When one of them found out that there was another cruise ship on the Nile that was infected with the coronavirus, he raised the alarm.

“We should tell the ship manager that we want to turn back,” he said to several of us, a note of panic in his voice. We had just started the cruise part of our trip in Luxor, heading south to Aswan and back.

“I trust that Viking to make that decision,” I said. “If they thought it was unsafe, they’d let us know.  Plus, I’m sure they have more information about it than we do.”

We did not turn back.

This Wasn’t in the Plan

I’m really glad we didn’t turn back. Our trip was fabulous (more on that in another post). And everything was pretty much going according to plan until the sandstorm hit the day we were supposed to return from Luxor to Cairo.

Sandstorms in Egypt are common, but not in March. And they can start and stop on a dime, lasting for a few hours or many days. Visibility is poor so the planes don’t fly, buses don’t drive, and ships don’t sail.

There are worse places to be stuck during a sandstorm than on a luxury ship with bountiful food, a bar, and comfortable beds. We made the best of it.

I was stressing about our flights home, though. I was unable to cancel them online and couldn’t get through to United on the phone numbers they provided on their website. Because we hadn’t booked our flights through Viking, they weren’t much help.

“Get backup flights,” my travel agent advised in an email.  By that time, I’d bitten the bullet and paid for the international data plan. That was my first good move.

My second good move was to book flights when we still didn’t know if we’d make it to Cairo on Thursday night. Viking was holding out hope that we’d get out, but it didn’t look good.  So we paid a premium to get two one-way tickets that took us on Saturday from Cairo to London and London to Chicago.

At that point we wanted to get home.  We didn’t care how much it cost. And we didn’t need to sit together.

We’re All in This Together

Our plane took off from Cairo on time and we made our connection in London. My ex-husband had a window seat next to an attractive young woman.  I had a bulkhead seat next to a 30-something woman with a crying baby and two fussy toddlers. That’s what I get for being claustrophobic.

Unfortunately we got to O’Hare at 6 p.m. on the first day of the travel ban. So did thousands of other people.

It took us four hours standing in line to get through customs and health screening. By then, we’d been up nearly 20 hours — neither of us had slept much on the plane. O’Hare officials tried to ease our pain by handing out water and Cheezits.

“We’re all in this together,” they told us. 

People were being friendly and polite to one another as we shuffled through the twisting Disneyesque lines together seeing the same faces. I heard the crying baby again.

At the 3.5 hour mark just as we were about to get to the second to last checkpoint, the computer system went down. I thought I was going to lose it right then and there.

But, we finally made it through to the health screening. The CDC asked us questions about where we’d been, if we’d come in contact with anyone with the virus, and how we were feeling. Then they took our temperature. We didn’t have any signs of the virus.

But we’d just been on a plane with 300 other people and in an enclosed space with hundreds more. Someone in that crowd had to have had it.