Into Africa
I’m planning to do a few blog posts about our Kenya trip, and this is the first one, briefly covering getting from the US to Kenya. We haven’t actually seen any wildlife yet (unless you count a few monkeys along the road from Nairobi airport to our lodging yesterday), and will start our safaris in the national parks tomorrow afternoon.
We met up with Rhonda and Marsha in Virginia, where we spent Monday hanging out at Marsha's apartment and then participating in a surprise birthday party for Alex. Some folks may recall Alex as the athletic girl who chased our dogs around for a week or two in June while visiting Montana with Marsha (aka Gramma) and her brother Justin.
Then we were up by 3AM on Tuesday for a 24 hour day of travel. First we were on the pleasantly empty 6AM flight from Ronald Reagan airport to JFK in New York, then we killed 6 hours at JFK before the long Kenya Airways flight to Nairobi.
We were in a bulkhead row with seats that couldn't decline, but the flight was empty enough that we managed to re-seat ourselves into multiple rows so that everyone was as comfortable as one can be for 14 hours in economy class seats.
When we arrived in Nairobi, a representative of our safari booking company met our flight and got us loaded into a van to our destination in the western suburb of Karen. Karen is named after Danish author Karen Blixen, who wrote the colonial memoir Out Of Africa. We're spending the first two nights of our trip at rental cottage on the land where her farm stood, before heading south into the wilderness for wildlife viewing.
Our cottages at the Karen Blixen Coffee Garden are nice, with attentive staff always nearby but out of sight. There are bottles of distilled water around, and mosquito netting around the bed at night. Water-borne and mosquito-borne illnesses are the main things to avoid in Eastern Africa.
We had a nice dinner at the poolside restaurant. I had the red snapper, and a cat sat next to my chair while I ate.
After a good night's sleep, Megan and I walked back to the poolside restaurant for breakfast. We'll be eating mostly Kenya food in the national parks, so we had a full English breakfast and eggs Benedict for our first breakfast of the trip.
I've just finished writing this post and will post it from the restaurant (where the WiFi is much better than in our room). Then we'll have a full day of sightseeing in Nairobi. I'll post again when I can.
