First leg of our Journey to South Africa

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Our First Blog Entry from this Adventure!

Greetings everyone, so Kaitlyn and I are safe and sound Stellenbosch South Africa but the journey here was a little longer then expected.

It started out fine with a night at my Aunt Ruthie's and Uncle Steve's in Newark NJ. The next morning we found that a few inches of snow had fallen and it was COLD out. But we made it to JFK International with plenty of time to spare.

We had a two hour layover in Senegal after our seven hour flight. The landing was ruff, but I have experienced worse and thought nothing of it. As the crew changed we all dosed off, it was about four in the morning.

So we taxi on the landing strip/runway and sat for a few hours because, as our captain said, there was a "blinking light".

Well that blinking light turned out to be a broken wing flap, and they do not have the equipment at Dakar Airport to fix it, so they needed to get a a crew to fly in from Atlanta GA. which would take a day. So they shipped us to this little room in the box they call the airport and we waited for any information.

And so a two hour lay over turned into a night at the best hotel in Dakar, in the Presidential Suite.

The hotel was nice but in an "African opulence" type of way. At a glance it all looked perfect, but you look closer and the tables are from Ikea and the tiles have been re-grouted a thousand times.

The beaches have great potential, but like in most developing nations, there are few public services so the beaches where covered in trash. It wrenches the heart to see such beauty and then such waste.

The next morning we were tired but ready to finally make it to South Africa. So we made it back on the, now fixed, plane and made the eight hour flight to the bottom of the continent.

So that was leg one, next our first few days here in SA!

Until next time,
Vanessa

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Photos

Waiting to see if we can get back on the Plan..
The Dakar Refugees, as we are lovingly called here at Stellie waiting in this room for hours, to find out our wing was broken and we were spending the night.

Nicole and Chris
Fellow refugees and Stellenbosch students on the bus to the hotel

The Bedroom
This hotel room is bigger then any apartment I will ever be able to rent.

Giant mask
I thought it was cool.

Comments

[aunt kathy]

More, please!
Love the photos, post more! Be sure to put Nessa or Kaitlyn in the pics. Do you have a bumper sticker from Nick's roast beef? You really need to get a photo for their video show. K