Posts filed under ‘Travel’
Our stay at Mena House, the Giza Plateau and the Great Pyramid
Here you have two photos from an adventure I treasure. The first time I went to Egypt, my husband and I stayed at the historic Mena House, a converted Pasha’s hunting lodge at the feet of the Pyramids. Can you imagine the thrill when we arrived late at night and were ushered into our room? The bell boy threw open the shuttered doors to this heart-stopping vista of the lighted Great Pyramid. I don’t ever remember a thrill greater than that moment. Better than anything I’d ever dreamed.
The Great Pyramid at night from our room at the Mena House, Giza, Egypt.
The following dawn, the growls of camels and shouts of their drivers awoke us. “Yellah! Yellah!” the turbaned men urged with sharp cries.
With no strength or will to tear myself away from the terrace, we ordered a room service feast with hot crusty rolls, thick apricot jam, plump fresh figs, and syrupy black coffee. While Jesper gazes in wonder, the early morning mists melt in the warming sun. Magic. Just plain magic.
My husband Jesper enjoying breakfast on the terrace of our room at the Mena House.
I hadn’t started my trilogy yet. The Red Mirror was still years in the future, waiting for me to stumble over it in a Las Vegas antique mall. Isis hadn’t spoken to me; she hadn’t shared her story. But the seed was most certainly planted that dawn, on that very terrace, at the old Mena House in the shadow of the eternal Pyramids.
S. L. Gore 
Radio Interview about my life and travels in North Africa
That’s me in 1976 outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Not North Africa but Middle East.
For more than three remarkable years of my life I lived in North Africa and the Middle East — specifically Morocco, Algeria and Saudi Arabia. Those adventures, both wonderful and not so wonderful, formed the person that I am today, and most especially, the woman who wrote Isis Trilogy. Drawn from my own personal experiences hitchhiking across the Sahara, surviving sandstorms, sleeping under vast desert skies, wandering from oasis to oasis, my books are a fanciful retelling of my life in settings right out of 1001 Nights.
Isis Trilogy: The Red Mirror, The Emerald Tablet, The Black Scroll.
Click Here for the March 18 2016 KVEC am radio podcast that retraces some of those adventures in an interview conducted by Deborah Bayles. My reminiscing lasts about 40 minutes. Commercial breaks have blessedly been removed.
That’s me in 1971 photo for Algerian visa to start my journey south across the Sahara.
Mark Rankin, the very brave American who traveled with me on our hitchhiking adventure. Yes, sometimes on trucks and sometimes on camels.
Highlighted towns from my Sahara Odyssey.
Share this:
May 26, 2016 at 11:53 pm Leave a comment