Egypt, with your own personal tour guide. You'll never forget it. We travelled there in 1999 on award tickets.

The Egyptians were building pyramids and other structures 6000 years ago for certain, and some experts believe the Sphinx is 12,000 years old. You will enter temples and tombs with the original paint still intact on the walls...please don't touch!

Egyptian tour guides are not just college students or part-timers, they have college degrees in tour guiding. We arranged in advance with Tal Tours of New York to provide a guide for a week, and that worked out super. Our guides (generally a driver and one of two guides) met us at the Cairo airport, led us right past the lines at the Sphinx and showed us important things inside that other folks didn't notice, told us the best places to take photos and took us there, put us on the train to Luxor and met us at the train station when we returned, and explained present-day Egyptian cultural issues.

Our family (2 adults and a teenager) has been fortunate to do quite a bit of travelling over the years, and we can get by in several languages. All three of us, including the teen-ager who hates history, agree that Egypt was our best vacation ever.

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