While I’m out in Egypt looking for a new best friend to power me across the water, I managed to catch up with on of my oldest. We windsurfed together back in the eighties, but after that summer he gave it up, can’t actually blame him, his Vinta weighed a tone. Compare that to beginner equipment of today and you’d wonder how windsurfing made it through the eighties.

I can’t actually remember a time with out Kevin as a friend. We live in the same town, with our homes never being more than half a mile apart, but some how we can still go a year without catching up. I’ve said many a time before, timing is everything and for us it more than often the opposite.

Just like our timing, our lives and interests run in different directions. While mine is spent on top of the water Kev is diver and spends most of his under it. We do share photography as an interest, but even then we run in different directions, and while I hate to admit it, yes he a twitchier. Even when we were young he was a slipper warier, not quite the tartan old man type, but I just couldn’t see myself in a pair of puffed up slippers that had a face and smocked a cigar.

But for me it isn’t what you do that makes you good friends, its what you share. I could walk into Kev’s after a year, or a day, it wouldn’t really matter its till the same crack. “Alright kid”, we should have given that greeting up years ago, but somehow it still feels right.

A true friend isn’t one you have to see every day or week, or fades with the first sign of trouble, and while I’ve been gifted to have several friends around the world that I really count as true friends, Kev has been my longest.

We’d been talking on Skype, so I knew Kev was working out in Egypt, just two hours up the road from El Tor, close enough for us to catch up. I’d like to get him back on the water, but as is life, he turned up on a windless day, but with a similar forecast for the following day, we planned a trip to the Pyramids.

A twelve hour round trip may seem a bit excessive, but considering the years it took to build them its like a drop in the ocean. Being one of the seven wonders I’ve read, and watched so much about them that they really shouldn’t be so surprising. While I could never put into words just how amazing they seem as you walk around them, it does seem a little wrong that you can watch over them at the local Pizza Hut. But then I had no idea just how close the city has become, I always had this vision of them out in the desert.

Trying to imagine how they built them is almost impossible, but one nugget of information penetrated my skull that put a little perspective on it. You can see from the pix, the blocks are huge, but they had to lay one block every two hours for twenty-three years. They had a hundred thousand pairs of hands to get it done, so somehow I get it, But then they blocks had to be cut, shipped across the country, couldn’t see DHL delivering them on time.

Before we left the Pyramids had left their mark on me, but not before I shed a little blood for them. Kev reckoned it was the curse of the pharaohs, I think he just wanted a picture than only a sick friend could take… see nothing changes.