Background to Africa

Many of you were very surprised when I Blogged about going to Africa...we didn't want to blog about it too much just because we would be out of town for so long and our apartment would be sitting there. Anyway- Africa was amazing and I would highly suggest going there to anyone. The flight there is painful, but once you are there it is so...well life changing.

My parents decided to go a couple of months ago (almost a year...if you know my dad he likes to plan things way in advance)! and invited us to go about two months before the trip. It was hard at first to think about leaving the kids for that long but once we realized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime we had to go for it. The kids stayed with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law for the first week and then due to girls camp etc went and stayed with my cousin Tiffany for the last couple days.

My mom had friends that had gone over and they all said that doing service was amazing and was well worth the effort and money that it took. I agree. They also said that since you are all the way over there you have to do some type of Safari...to end your trip on more of an upbeat note. It was such an amazing vacation and the nice part is that we were kept so busy that we didn't have time to sit and really think about how much we missed the kids. We were up and going around 7 every morning and didn't get home until 6 at night...and by that point we were exhausted. We did that routine for a week and then took a plane down to Kenya, and then got on another plane...a 12 passenger plane (talk about a fear of flying here) and flew out to a reserve called "The Mara Intrepid". That whole week was amazing (will fill in more details at a later time) and then took off Tuesday morning at 11 and were pretty much in an airplane for the next 22 hours (yes...painful). Anyway- it was a great trip and I will do more about the Safari later.