My work frequently brings me to Africa. After years of doing this, I have become intimately familiar with the flight schedules and the fact that there are only five direct options from Dulles:
Ethiopian Airlines’ flight to Addis Ababa
EgyptAir’s flight to Cairo
Royal Air Maroc’s flight to Casablanca, and
United’s flights to Accra and Cape Town
For the most part, I avoid these direct flights and choose to connect in Europe, take a long layover, stretch my legs, and have a good meal before continuing on.
But the Ethiopian flight is the 800lb gorilla in the room. It’s cheap and they offer a lot of easy connections to cities in east Africa. But after a few bad experiences on this 14-hour flight—crying babies, no food, extreme turbulence, late arrivals and missed connections, and chaotic boarding and deplaning processes, and an ancient airport—i’ve spend 5 years avoiding the route.
Until now.
The schedule convenience the flight offered me, as well as contribution to my frequent flyer account, couldn’t be ignored.
To alleviate some of the headaches associated with the route, I decided this time I’d take an overnight stop there—if a missed connection was going to force me to hang out there anyways, at least I'd already have a hotel room with a soft bed.
To keep myself from falling asleep upon arrival, I booked a local tour.
