A Couple of Escapes from Reality

I had a lovely birthday in Kenya! In the morning I was being a baby and kind of feeling sorry for myself since the kids were in fine form and the day was promising to be a long one, but it happily picked up. The kids and I spent the morning at the orphanage (see the pic of B feeding one of the little girls!), the team bought me a gorgeous bouquet of roses, and the best part was that evening. J planned a very sweet date for us to a great restaurant we had never been to. We sat by candlelight on the patio where they were playing live music, and they even had flourless chocolate cake! It felt like when we were dating! We actually had some time alone to converse and process had our whole experience here together. He couldn’t have given me a better gift than quality time, which has been in short supply as of late, so I was a happy girl!

One of the funniest parts of the evening was our transportation. J borrowed LIA’s 12 passenger old school van to drive us to the restaurant. That in and of itself would be good enough, but add to it the fact that the van has no power-steering, is stick shift (left-handed), and it must be driven on the opposite side of the road, and you have a very entertaining ride. We had some laughs and thankfully made it home safely. Our apologies to one tree, however.

Then, on Sunday we got to go with the team on our very first Safari! We drove two hours out of the city to a national park in Nakuru. We had rented a safari van (that thankfully included a driver who knew what he was doing!) with a roof that raised up so you could stand to take pictures of wildlife as it went by. Since they could stand up and ride on our laps B and T happily spent hours looking for animals and B’s favorite – the butterflies. We literally drove for hours around Lake Nakuru through acres of beautiful jungle and savanna never knowing what we’d see next. We spotted a lioness sitting up in a tree, just yards away from us.

We saw lots of zebras, including sweet baby ones (and even some just out freely on the side of the road long before we reached the park), giraffes, water buffalo, flamingos, baboons, and lots of monkeys. In fact, while we were in the parking lot B and T needed a snack, and at this point, the monkeys outside did, too. They lunged for them, but Papa thankfully intercepted them before another guy on the team kicked rocks at them; thus, rescuing my children from the wild monkeys! B gave up eating her snack and T chose to go and finish his in the car. It was such a great adventure and we so enjoyed our time in the beauty of Kenya.

Today the team is back to filming and then they head out tomorrow night. They are a wonderful group of people, and we are so very sad to see them go. We have loved having people around and the kids have gotten quite accustomed. We are really excited about what will come about with the documentary though! Stay tuned!