I know, I know...it's been way too long between blog posts. No excuses - we've been busy enjoying friends, old and new, and haven't had much time to write. But we'll try to do better going forward and we'll definitely fill in the blanks later. This post will just give a quick update on where we've been in the past few weeks.
Last we wrote, we were getting ready to welcome friends, Dan and Deb, from home in PA to Hoedspruit, to share our last few days there. We spent the days feeling like locals - showing them around, taking them to our favorite restaurants, introducing them to the wonderful people who had welcomed us into their community for our short two month stay, teaching them the ways of life on a big game estate in the bush, going on safari in Kruger National Park, and then leaving before our wonderful hosts returned home a day later.
The house swap was an incredible experience. And how lucky we were to be able to take advantage of an opportunity that essentially dropped in our laps. It was amazing...and yet only the first phase of our adventure.
I'm not going to go into detail about our awesome adventures with Deb and Dan here (this is just a quick 'Howdy, we're still alive!" post.) But from Hoedspruit we headed down to the Garden Route, and drove west toward Cape Town for a couple of weeks. It was beautiful and very fun. Cape Town was definitely a highlight and a favorite for us all. Here's the route we took:
After Dan and Deb headed back to PA, we spent another few days in Cape Town, then a few days in Johannesburg, and then, we left South Africa after a 2.5 month stay and headed out to Rwanda to see mountain gorillas, chimps, and golden monkeys. (The gorillas were so cool. )
Then we headed to Kenya where we did a safari tour. Yes, we'd done tons of safaris in South Africa but these promised to be different - different terrains, different animals, etc. It was tons of driving (too much really), and while the first two stops were cool (Samburu for the unique animals you don't see anywhere else and Lake Nakuru for the beautiful lake), the highlight of that tour was really the Masai Mara, which definitely lived up to its reputation for wide open miles and miles of savanna grasslands where you really could experience amazing animal sightings.
After Kenya, we took a quick 4 day stop in Istanbul - definitely not enough time for that beautiful city. The city and the people left us knowing that we'll need to go back to explore more in Istanbul and surrounding other parts of Turkey.
And now - We've just landed in Portugal where we await the arrival of our kids for some family travel time over their holiday break. It seems impossible that 3.5 months have flown by so quickly. We're excited for this last leg but it will be nice to get home and sleep in our own bed in a couple of weeks.
More details to come.
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