Stuck in the desert

It is big and comfy, complete with lean-back seats, AC—not all buses here have that, and a flat screen TV up front. This is also our bus’s maiden voyage and it is still working out a kink or two…
Tara—let’s sit in the back, than we can sit all together.
Tara, Katharine and I setup camp in the back of the bus.
On the way to Marsha Matruh
A couple hours later finds waking up from naps to breathe the smell of gas. After putting shirts over our noses for a few minutes and Tara talking about how many brain cells we were losing I decided it was time ---Sullivan! It smells like gas back here.
Turns out the gas filter was broken.
We stopped at a military museum and graveyard while it was fixed.Rushhh we’re NOT getting stuck in the back of that bus again. We stretched out, opened our books and turned on our ipods, happy to be seats away from the front of the bus for the three hour ride to Siwa from Marsa Matruh.
This time we woke up to a burning smell….a smell no one could miss.
We pulled over to the side of the road, which happened to be desert. In fact all we could see, with the exception of a little stand and shed thing, was desert in every direction and our road.
We waited an hour or so for vans to drive from our hotel to rescue us.
Our poor driver, who had to wait with the bus, didn’t arrive in Siwa until 4 a.m. in the morning. –we’d left MM at about 1:30 p.m.
We drove our bus to the cites this morning and other than a few scratches, from trees that reached into the dirt road, everything went fine.
We’re driving our bus back to Cairo on Friday 13th.
This could be an adventure…..

Update: we’re back at Flamenco hotel in Cairo. Unpacking and repacking for Abu Dhabi. We’re going out with the guys 6-ish “real time…” to where, they won’t tell us.
We’re staying at the Intercontinental hotel, all expense paid, with 30 students from Arab countries.
Our conferences are supposedly 10-5 Sunday through Tuesday. We were assigned around 300 pages of reading material which I’ve done some of and been disappointed by. Instead of providing intelligent information and answering questions it brings up points without providing adequate context and seems to miss the big picture.
There is however, one thing the reading brought to out attention. The whole time we’ve been talking about how liberal the Arab Emirates are, Sullivan said “anything goes in Dubai,” more than once.
Turns out women couldn’t even vote until 2006….
The next section of this journey is underway—I’ll update as possible, I might not pay for internet at the hotel…