We’ve been home for a few days now.
Our travel “day” ended up being literally 48 hours long.
- We started at 9:15 Tuesday morning in Tanzania (2:15 AM in the US), flying from Ngorongoro to Mt. Kilimanjaro for Tanzanian departure processing then
- flew to Wilson Airfield in Nairobi then
- drove to the Jomo Kenyatte Airport for COVID testing then
- to the Four Points hotel near the airport for a brief respite & dinner then
- BACK to JKA to catch our 1:25 AM Wed flight from Nairobi to Doha (in Qatar) then
- Doha to Miami (~16 hours)
- weather there delayed us by a couple of hours, so that it was after 1:30 AM when we landed in Columbia
- and 2:15 AM Thursday when we arrived home.
You can imagine that Thursday was pretty much a blur, and Friday was only a little better. Saturday (yesterday) was the first day I started to feel like myself again.
I wanted to start going through all my pictures right away, while everything was still fresh. I took pictures with both my phone and an old but pretty good digital camera, and Thursday I got all those images copied to my computer and sorted by date/location. Good thing I have such detailed notes in my travel journal – those were invaluable for that process. Then I started going through each set of pictures and changing the file names to something meaningful. I have loved looking through them all and remembering. I still have two more days/places to go – Ngorongoro and Lake Manyara.
But here’s the thing: every night now I dream about being on safari. Dreams are how we integrate our experiences into our mental landscapes: I’m still integrating. What will all this mean in my life going forward? To paraphrase Emily Bronte, these experiences have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind. I don’t yet know where that will lead, but I’m willing to find out.
Thank you, dear friend… for sharing your lovely journey with super pics and outstanding words… So happy that you and Mick had this experience together. Love you!!!