Egypt, Israel and Greece….Why?
Outside of being asked the common question of “How was your holiday?” The next most asked question has been “Why, those places?”
What a great question, I too would be wondering why someone would travel there. What a random combo of countries to visit.
It all started a couple of years ago in July 2022, one night sitting on the couch where Nathanael very and I mean VERY casually tells me that he has won a competition through the credit card and had won second place landing him 500,000 Velocity Frequent Flyer points. Amazing, right? Well, we didn’t really know because we didn’t know what that meant.
Upon further research by me which included joining a Velocity Facebook page, we came to realise it would give us about $5000 worth of flights and that we could fly economy pretty much anywhere but South America and return for free. What a win hey!
We then waited for our points to hit our account a few months later and upon thinking about where we could go etc. Nathanael spoke about how he wanted to use the points to go somewhere you wouldn’t normally ever go unless you won a free trip and then proceeded to say “I think going to Egypt would be cool”. 10 years of marriage and I’d never heard him say that was a cool place to go but here we were. Not really taking it seriously it stayed on the back burner as we settled in with Lydia and life with her as she was only a few months old at this point.
Fast forward to July 2023 and after entering a competition myself from making a fun video for a Flybuys competition which we still absolutely love watching. You can view it here if you want. I was notified that I had won 1,000,000 Flybuys points and the equivalent of $5000. What in the world! How could we possibly be so dang lucky to win not one, but TWO competitions like this. That was it. We decided this was a sign that we really were meant to go on a holiday. So a few weeks later and after asking mum if she would watch all our wonderful and extremely well-behaved easy children we booked tickets to go to…
EGYPT, ISRAEL & GREECE.
Now why, well Egypt because where else do you go when you win a once-in-a-lifetime amount of flight points. Israel because it is soooo dang close to Egypt and I really wanted to go to ‘Jesus Land’ and Greece because you can’t get direct flights (Not even pre war) from Egypt to Israel even though they are neighbouring countries. You have to take a 2-hour flight to Athens and then a 2-hour flight down to Israel. So working out we could just fly home from Athens on our points we added on a few days there to finish our trip.
Incredible. We had booked it in August 2023 for March 2024 because we knew that if we did fall pregnant (as we were trying for another one) I would still be able to fly then. So flights booked from Brisbane to Cairo and Athens to Brisbane. Great! Excited.
From late August we started doing a little bit of research into where we would like to visit etc. but figuring we have months to plan we didn’t do too much and then as you know first week of October. WAR BREAKS OUT IN ISRAEL/GAZA. Oh, man! What a horrible thing to happen and what a complete unknown for our time away. With the Government immediately withdrawing support for travel and flights being cancelled and emergency situations occurring we rang Virgin and were told we could cancel our tickets for $260 each. We were told though we could do it that day or the day before we flew and it would be the same. That’s when we decided to sit tight and see what happened.
October passed, November passed, December passed and then January was nearly over. Not too much had changed with the war. It was still advised not to travel and we were resigned to the fact we would just cancel the week before and who knows.
We floated different ideas around over those months, do we travel somewhere else, do we fly business class to Singapore and then take a 2-week cruise home etc. but I didn’t want to take any of these options. I wanted our holiday or nothing at all.
The end of January came and Nathanael’s boss says to him. “Hey, you’ve got 3 weeks’ holidays booked that you haven’t cancelled are we going to need to cover you?” Nathanael said we needed to make a final decision on cancelling. Now if you know me, you would know a couple of things.
Firstly, I don’t like to give up. If I can find a way to make it work and make it happen I will. I will exhaust absolutely all options before I concede defeat.
Secondly, I am one to push the boundaries and limits a little bit (Mum is probably shaking her head at this point and suggesting it’s a lot more than a little). I ‘sometimes‘ don’t like to conform to being told I can’t do something. Sooooo, when the government says “avoid all non-essential” I take that to mean I get to decide what is ‘essential’.
This is why I married such an incredible human who balances me out by saying he is not going to travel to Israel and risk anything. Urgh, so sensible. So off I went with option 1….just to be sure.
So, I started googling, which I had been doing all along but finally, I came across ONE site that had a little more information on travelling and the safety around it.
Then I went to Facebook and found pages dedicated to travelling to Israel with 40 thousand members and I decided to start searching safety posts.
Finally, I made my own post asking about the safety of travelling and the current situation. To my surprise, we had hundreds of responses from locals, tour guides, current tourists, ex tourists before and after the start of the war and 99% of them said it was completely safe and that if we didn’t actually travel into the war zones, we would be fine as they were all just going about life as normal over there.
No freaking way! Off to Nathanael, I race sharing my news and how it would be totally fine. Well, Nathanael was not budging he had requirements that needed to be satisfied before he would even consider discussing the topic. So, we asked more and more questions, we asked about tour guides, areas, bombings and more. After reading and speaking with so many people we decided we would pray about it. We came to the conclusion that we felt we could make an informed decision (not one based on the media and the doom and gloom) that we would feel safe to go.
What a great pair we make. Dedicated Sarah who without, Nathanael would never have considered going and level-headed Nathanael who reigns Sarah in to ensure a well-rounded decision is made.
Very exciting, the trip was back on. With 4 weeks to go before our departure flight and absolutely nothing booked. No flights between countries, no accommodations, no tours, no activities, no thoughts on weather and outfits that might be needed at 14 weeks pregnant, and no travel equipment prepared.
So, when I say those 4 weeks before we left were hectic as, I mean it. Within a couple of weeks I had booked (I was on booking and preparing, Nathanael was on itinerary choosing) 5 flights, 5 different accommodations, airport transfers, tours, clothing, must-haves etc.
This also coincided with back to school and Kindy and getting everyone settled into a routine again. It involved preparing highly detailed instructions/information for Mum to have access to whatever I could possibly think of that would make her life easier when being here. Foods the kids would eat, diagrams on their lunchboxes and which foods go in which area, passwords for WIFI, robovac, Kindy sign-in, you name it, I had it. Not at all due to her lack of ability but with the intention of trying to make it easier for her due to the immense guilt I/we felt at having such an incredible woman prepared to take our life over and give us a once-in-a-lifetime holiday.
And that’s the story…that’s how we went from being people who had hung up our travelling hats for many years, focusing on saving for our future home and future lives as an intended big family with the thought of maybe in 20-30 years pulling the hats down and giving them some kind of dust off to be used, to end up going on a 3 week holiday overseas to really random and incredible locations of Egypt, Israel and Greece.
We feel incredibly blessed that almost 85% of this holiday was covered by winnings. I can only put it down to the blessing of Heavenly Father and what I think was his desire for us to reconnect as a couple and his desire for us to visit the Holy Land and walk where Jesus had walked…but more on that later.
The first stop for us was Egypt and it was eye-opening, baffling and such a mixed bag of experiences and I’m thrilled to be able to share it with you.
Love Sarah Kay, xx
P.s. For those wondering, mum survived and just this morning (29th May) said that it feels like she didn’t even have them for 3 weeks. So to me, that sounds like she is ready for round 2 right? 😉
