Greene Girls Do Egypt

I've always found the "*insert porn star's name* Does *insert location*" titles hilarious. So I use this format to describe my vacations. HarDeeHarHar! Ok. So, my sisters and I have started a tradition where we go on a sister's trip every August, our birthday month. They are in to fashion and designer trinkets but my Dora The Explorer lessons have encouraged them to add traveling to their budget too. I was an only child for 13 years, so I traveled a lot as a child before they came along. I have the travel bug. My closest friends and I have been traveling way before Travel Noire became a thing. My yearly travel schedule is usually filled with standing trips before we even start receiving invites to destination weddings and things like that. Fancy's yearly travels look like this:

• Family Trip
• Girl's Trip to Cape Cod/Martha's Vineyard
• Sister's Trip
• Romantic Trip with hubby

In that order!

I've done almost multiple Caribbean vacations multiple times. To me, it's all the same. Blue water, cocktails and naps on the beach, fresh seafood, an excursion to zip line or ATV riding, blah blah blah. I do it once a year but I feel like I can do that in my backyard too, so I'm not enthused about spending $1500-$2000 pp to fly somewhere to do it. Plus, my wifi at home is popping. LOL! So, when it came time to plan our 2017 Sister's Trip we wanted to do something different. My sister's have never been overseas, so the first place they wanted to do is Italy, for the shopping, of course. But with all the Black Lives Matter and resurfacing of racism in America, we decided to start exploring the history of our mother land, Africa, instead of Europe.

Now Africa is a whole continent, so I did my research and talked to my Nigerian friends to ask them where we should start. I did the research, we established a budget, talked to a travel agent and eventually found a deal on Living Social. $1599 for an all-inclusive, 10 day tour of Egypt. Yes. That is correct $1600 for round trip flight, hotel accommodations in 4 different Egyptian cities, most meals, all transportation in and through each city, an expert tour guide, armed security, and a tourism police escort through Egypt. I say all this to say, traveling does not have to cost an arm and a leg. Shit. It costs more than $1600 for a nice weekend in Miami, FL for the weekend. This was half of our budget of $3000.

We booked it in January. August came really quickly. I was having anxiety the day before because it had just hit me that I would be leaving my son alone with my husband for 10 days. EEK! My stylist sister, Thee Fashioneer™, had custom sweats made for traveling. Our bags were less than 23 kgs. We hit the road. Well, the plane, but whatever. LOL! 

Two flights, 16 hours later, we arrived in Cairo, Egypt. It was dark when we arrived but we knew we were not in Kansas anymore. If you followed my Instastory on @IyonnaWoods you saw the day to day adventures of our Egyptian experience. I'm not going to get into the minute details of our trip. I'm just going to list the highlights of our trip.

Egyptian Experience Lessons

• Those LivingSocial and Groupon travel deals are legit. Take the risk.
• The Revolution was in 2011. Egypt is safe to visit.
• Physical evidence of the revolution is very prevalent. The people were awesome.
• Egyptians do not look like Western Africans. They look Middle Eastern and speak Arabic.
• Traveling to historic destination with an educated tour guide is the way to go. You're forced to go to the sites and not sleep in, they will guide you in interact ing with the locals, you are supporting the local economy.
• Nuba means keeper of gold. The Nubian people lived in southern Egypt and northern Sudan where the largest quarry of gold was. They were subject to attack because of the gold. 
• Ancient Egyptian royalty loved gold.
• Nubian people are noticeably darker than other Egyptians.
• I will be going back to referring to myself as a Nubian sister.
• Tourism is a real industry. Natives go to college and earn degrees in Egyptology to become a tour guide. The arts schools train students to become proficient in hieroglyphics, papyrus making, flower essence making, etc.
• Americans don't travel to Northeastern Africa often.
• African-Americans don't travel to Africa often.
• Russia has callous influence on more countries than we realize. Convincing the Egyptian president to move the Nubian people from the native land in order to build a dam in the Nile river that would flood them instead of building a series of locks along the river. The locks would be cheaper to build and the people could stay. Russia said "just move the people".😢
• Pack protein shakes and snacks when traveling to a different culture. I am on a low carb diet. Egyptians serve about 6 servings of bread for breakfast. I got hunger sick for the first 3 days of our trip because I wasn't eating breakfast. Lesson learned.
• Ancient Egyptians were ultra engineers.
• Ancient Egyptians were SUPER elaborate.
• Ancient Egyptians were very thorough.
• When it's super hot and sunny, cover your skin. You'll be cooler.

We bought a LivingSocial sold by Encounters Travel. It was one of the best travel experiences I have ever had. They thought of everything that we would experience and had a solution. They added all kinds of updates and surprises to our itinerary. Our tour guide, Big Mo, was extremely personable and knowledgeable. I would not hesitate to book travel directly through Encounters for any future travel needs.

Check out my full vacation album if you're bored at work or your son's football practice. Just click here.



Shameless Plug Alert:
We spent the majority of days and nights traipsing about in the African desert heat and sun. I'm talking 107℉ by 9:30a sun and heat. I only used Fancy Free Aluminum Free Deodorant and Fancy Free Milk for Hair & Skin as sunscreen. I did have pit sweat, I don't think the kind of deodorant matters in that kind of heat, but I did not smell bad at the end of the day. I did get slightly darker but I did not burn. Just so you know. These products are available at www.fancyfreellc.com.😊

When The Time Is Right

I'm writing this for women who feel like it will never happen for them. When the time is right. It will happen. Work on your relationship. Work on yourself. Exercise. Eat right. Take your vitamins. Pray. Don't stress. Jehovah knows what's best.

My husband and I got married in 2007 after 4 years of dating. In retrospect, we were young and dumb. He was still in residency, I was still in school but we both knew that we were made for each other. The first four years of our marriage were TOUGH! Mostly due to selfishness and immaturity on both parts. What people don't tell you about getting married is that you don't automatically think like a wife or a husband right after you say "I do". There's no switch. You have to grow into those roles.
We had essentially been in a long distance relationship the entire 4 years that we dated. Even though DC and Baltimore aren't that far from each other, with his school schedule and my work and school schedule, the weekends or every other weekend was when we spent time together. The rest of the time was spent talking on the phone. No Facetime back then. LOL! Sometimes we went as long as 6 weeks with out actually seeing each other. Absence makes the heart grow fonder but you also don't realize how annoying someone can be when you aren't around them all the time.

My Role

I was I-N-D-E-P-E-D-E-N-T. I had purchased my home and maybe one investment property. I had a car. I was making decent money. I lived alone. I was used to coming and going as I pleased because I had no one to be accountable to. I liked things a certain way. The right
way. My way. I was brash and bossy. I was a caretaker. I did everything and did not expect him to help out around the house because he was working 80-100 hours per week. I handle all of his "business" without him asking for help. I did not allow any negative consequences so that he could figure stuff out on his own and learn.

His Role

He was "focused" on his career, which meant quality time with me was often neglected. If it came down to spending time with me doing something he didn't necessarily want to do or work/sleeping for work or softball, he had a habit of choosing something other than me. He did not offer to help me out around the house because usually it was taken care of. He ignored me when I fussed.

Delay In Kids

We never put our marital problems on blast. EVER! We worked on them in private. I'd joke when people asked me when we were gonna start a family and say "We gotta figure out if we like each other enough before we do alladat." or "With all these advances in medicine, I got until a smooth 40 before pregnancy becomes an issue. I got trips to take."
But the reality was, we had some things to work through before we jumped into adding even more stress, like a crying infant. LOL! We had to get our finances in order. People assume because you're in a certain tax bracket or have a certain career that your money is right. No. We had to learn to set a budget and stick to it. I had my way of doing things and he never had any financial responsibility. He had been in school from age 6 to 26. We had to learn how to communicate with each other. We had to perfect our roles on the team. He learned to do laundry and dishes. I folded, dried and put them away. We budgeted in a housekeeper for all the other things. I went to the grocery store. He carried bags and put groceries away. I handled the bills and communicated where we were. He made sure I had access to everything I needed. Most importantly, we went to marriage counseling. I'm not talking about going to sit with our pastor at church or a marriage ministry bible study, not that there is anything wrong with that. But we needed something a little more candid. I'm talking about a certified therapist, who gave us assignments and helped us really hear each other. Our therapist gave us a book to read that really helped us understand each other better, Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix, with the work book.
Once we went to therapy together, we were able to get to the root of "why" instead of focusing on the "what". Things were moving in the right direction but it still wasn't enough. Both of us had to do some work on ourselves, so still, to this day, we have regular individual therapy sessions. We have grown leaps and bounds....together. Once our communication improved, everything else improved. EVERYTHING.
We got our money right.  We traveled. We bought dumb stuff. Had regrets. We were finally able to got into our groove late into year 6.

The Plunge

Our marriage was on track. We had checked everything off of our bucket list from our 20s. We were in good places in our careers. We decided that we'd start trying for a baby in August 2015. August was ideal because we had a few trips in the summer and we wanted to be able to drink and do excursions. LOL! Although we are both healthy, it was still in the back of our minds that we were 35 years old and that we may encounter some difficulties getting pregnant now that we'd "done it right". You know, finished school, advanced our careers, traveled, enjoyed marriage, and THEN started a family.
We were both taking our vitamins, working out, eating right and so in July, we counted 14 days from the first day of my cycle and set the date to begin trying, August 1. At least twice a day, every other day for 7 days. We had fun. No stress.
I had some of my closest friends in town to celebrate my anniversary of birth, August 24, for the weekend.
Lots of food, fun, and sun. AND libations. Then it hit me, my period was supposed to come. So I took a test before they left. That thang turned positive within 30 seconds. I showed my husband. He high fived me, like I was a softball teammates. LOL! We had done it. The time was right. We were in a good place in our marriage and in life. Jehovah had blessed us at 35 with our first son. No fertility treatments, even though those vitamins had our loins on fleek. LOL! No stress. No in vitro. Just love. We celebrated 8 years of marriage this year and pray for a healthy baby boy to be born in April 2016. God is good.