The Nile River.

Filled with fame and folklore, history and current events, mystery and exoticism. For many people, seeing The Nile River is a bucket list item, and who could blame them?

Some of us, however, are not that impressed by a 4000-mile-long river with an even longer history in humanity. My husband is one of those unimpressed people.

It was his first trip to Africa, and we were flying into Uganda at the worst time for an international flight: 6am. Between jet lag and flying through the night, your body is all sorts of messed up. All we wanted to do was sleep.

But I had a better idea. A brilliant idea, even. What if—instead of sleeping—we just went to The Nile River? Our work in Uganda started the next day, and I knew that we would be busy for the rest of the trip with little chance to see the river. Better yet, it’s not just looking at a river. Uganda holds the source of the Nile River, where it all begins. Maybe one day we’d even get to the end of the river, too.

I had already seen the Nile on an earlier trip to Uganda, and I felt it was worth it to make the trek to Jinja, the town that hosts the source of the Nile. I thought it was a pretty cool experience and I wanted Douglas to see it for himself, too.

Douglas was skeptical. He was tired and jet-lagged and seemed less-than-impressed about the Nile River. Eventually, though, I convinced him that today was the day we needed to see it. It was now or never—and how could you possibly give up the opportunity to see the Nile?

On the way from the airport to the hotel, I told our driver, Sam, that we wanted to see the Nile today. He was happy to oblige, so after a brief hour to settle into the hotel, we were on our way to Jinja to see the Nile.

Now, I had somehow remembered the trip from Kampala, the capitol of Uganda, to Jinja as only an hour. Turns out I had a bad memory. This was unfortunate for Douglas, as I had sold him on the trip idea as “it’s only an hour away!”

It turned out to be three hours long, with Sam trying to desperately keep the energy alive by saying, “Just a little further; not much longer!” Douglas was struggling. I was struggling. It felt awful, but I kept on assuring Douglas that he will be glad he did the trip.

I definitely doomed it all when I promised that.

After our painfully long drive, we finally reached the bridge that crosses over the Nile. “There it is!” I said to him.

“Wow, yep,” replied Douglas. “That is indeed the Nile.”

I don’t know if it was sarcasm or tiredness seeping through his voice, but whatever it was, it was certainly not the enthusiasm I was looking for.

“Is… this what we came for? To drive over a bridge?” he asked

“No! Not at all! There’s far more to the tour than this!” I exclaimed, trying to rally up some pep about it. I was getting worried that he would stay perpetually unimpressed.

The good news is, he didn’t stay unimpressed. The bad news is, he downgraded from unimpressed to utterly miserable.

First, it was the parking lot. $20 for our car and ourselves. I assured Douglas not to worry about it—sure, it was expensive for Uganda, but what’s $20 in the face of seeing the source of the Nile?

Then we had to pay an entrance fee. But that’s ok, I told Douglas, because now we are in the park and we can just head on down to the water and get on a boat. It’s like 5 bucks to take the boat ride!

We arrived at the start of the park, and right away we had a self-designated tour guide. We did not want a tour guide. He insisted that we would want a tour guide. So we shrugged our shoulders and agreed to the tour.

He began right away. “This table you see in front of you has all the countries listed that helped build this park.”

That was it. No further description. Just crickets from all of us.

“Come this way,” he beckoned us. He walked us down the path about one minute before stopping in front of a statue.

“This statue is of this particular man,” the tour guide started. I don’t know who the man was, and neither did the tour guide seem to know, because he proceeded to read directly off the plaque on the statue.

We stared at the statue, trying to muster up interest in it, but we simply couldn’t.

“Do you want to take a picture?” the tour guide asked.

“No.” Douglas’ tired and grumpy face showed how little willingness he had to entertain such a thought.

We awkwardly moved along for another minute or so before we reached the boat launch.

“And here is where you can take the boat to the source of the Nile,” the tour guide said, rather unhelpfully. Not like the table talk and statue pondering had been helpful at all, either.

Finally! We made it! Now we could do something exciting. I turned to Douglas and smiled—this should pick up his spirits a bit!

But before we could even speak, the tour guide interjected, “The boat ride is 50 dollars.”

Wait… what?! Why had I remembered it costing only $5? First I had misremembered the travel time, and now I had underestimated the cost of the boat?

That’s when it dawned on me: the boat was $50 for every trip out, so the more people you pile in, the less expensive per person. When I had gone, we had a boat full of people, and I pitched in just 5 bucks. Now the full cost of the boat would be shouldered by us.

We didn’t even have to have a discussion before Douglas replied, “Oh, forget it! I’m not paying that!” as he started to walk away.

“Wait, wait!” the tour guide called after him.

Douglas turned around, waiting to hear what he had to say.

“The cost of my tour is $5,” he sheepishly told him.

Douglas let off a stream of mutterings as he pulled out his wallet and handed over a five-dollar bill in the most irritable fashion that he had within him. Which, to be honest, didn’t take much at this point.

Now faced with the reality that we had spent 3 hours in the car, paid probably around $40 in parking and entrance fees, and after that we weren’t going to see the source of the Nile after all, we came to the same realization at the same time: Now we have to trek back 3 hours again.

Not ready to pile back into the car again, we decided to stop at the little restaurant along the Nile River. If we couldn’t float out on it, at least we could sit right next to it and get a meal, too.

We pointed to our orders on the menu. “Oh, we don’t have that right now,” the waitress said. We moved on to the next option. “Sorry, we don’t have that either,” she said, embarrassed.

“Well, then, how about you tell us what you do have?” Douglas asked. (Absolutely nothing was going our way on this day, if you couldn’t tell.)

“We have the chips, sir,” she replied.

“Cool. Guess we’ll just get a plate of French fries and nothing else,” he retorted. All that travel, all that tiredness, all that disappointment about the River, and now we don’t even get a real lunch!

She hurried away with our order. I told Douglas is he leaned really far over the railing, he could possibly see in the distance the little island that marks the source of the Nile. He obliged.

“Oh, yep, there it is,” he said with sarcastic enthusiasm. “Now I’ve seen it all!”

He dropped into his chair at the little restaurant. We looked at each. We looked at Sam. Sam looked at us.

And we all just started laughing hysterically.

For a few minutes we didn’t even say anything. We just kept laughing. We didn’t need to speak, for we all knew exactly what we were laughing about. The terribly long ride. The stupid parking lot. The most ridiculous tour ever in our lives. The outrageous boat price. The restaurant with only a basket of French fries.

When we finally calmed down enough to speak, Sam opened up. “You know, when we were walking down here, the tour guide said to me, ‘I don’t think that man is enjoying this at all.’ And I said back to him, ‘I don’t think so, either! And worse yet, I have to stick with this guy for the next week!’”

We started laughing all over again at Sam’s fear of the upcoming week of doom with the crankiest man he had ever met in his life. But Sam was starting to see that that’s not who Douglas is—that it was just a really, really long day filled with disappointment. From there, the trip would go in a positive direction.

Actually… to be honest, nothing about that trip to Uganda went positively. But that’s a story for another time.

Meanwhile, we laughed over our fries and dreaded the drive back to the hotel. Somehow, we survived it all.

A few years later while celebrating our ten-year anniversary, we reflected on the best moments we had experienced, as well as some of the flops. In spite of how funny the trip is now, the Nile River ranked Number One of the flop list.