Leavin' on a Jet Plane

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Geo: -1.27975, 36.8126

DAY FIFTEEN (Friday, September 18, 2009)

Leavin' on a jet plane

No alarm clock this morning … got a full 8 hours of sleep. We packed, had breakfast and relaxed, waiting for our 10 am departure.

It was a long travel day:

- Transfer to local airport where we shopped the "duty-free shop" set up in a hut.

· Air Kenya flight (one hour or so) to Nairobi and transfer to our downtown hotel through some horrific traffic; I gather it's always awful, to the point you have to allow LOTS of extra time to make sure you make your plane

· We had rooms at the Nairobi Serena Hotel, one of the top hotels in Nairobi, where security guards checked our car for bombs before we could be dropped off. A bit unsettling.

· Tauck had arranged day rooms for us until we left for our flights (we arrived at the hotel about 12:30 and had 7 hours to relax, repack {we were reunited with our big luggage after several days], and eat, which was pretty much the only real thing on our agenda besides getting to and from airports.

· First we lunched, which was quite wonderful, with a seafood salad and other exotic international capitol cuisine.

· We used our time to repack, and spread our things among 3 bags instead of two to get them home.

· The hotel packaged the wood carving wall hanging I bought in the hopes it would make it home safely; we slipped it into Patrick's long, wheeled duffle bag (no charge, just a tip for the young man who did the work).

· Barcy and I headed to the salon and got our nails down, which was quite a luxury after two weeks in the bush. Between the dry air, the sandals, the stuff we walked in, my heels had felt like the rawest grade of sandpaper.

· We had dinner (again, an elegant buffet that included lobster) and bid our new friends farewell. Most folks were leaving on a KLM flight to Amsterdam which Tauck had booked them on which left earlier than ours, so we bid our farewells in the lobby.

· We did our final packing and met Mike and Mary Ann Schuermann (from St. Louis and on our same flight) and Stephanie Foote and Carol Sobel, headed to Denver, for our harrowing ride to the airport; it was so awful I chose not to look; others gasped many times with close calls at high-impact speeds.

Check-in was challenging, but not extremely so:

· First is the worry that what you have bought is going to make your bags overweight. I always pack a piece of luggage that is made of parachute silk. I stuff it with dirty clothes and that leaves space in the solid luggage to put my purchases. Worked well this time, as it always has in the past.

· In Nairobi, you go through security THREE times! Just when you think you've put your laptop away for the last time, it's out again. On the third time through, they nabbed me for cuticle scissors. They got Schuermanns for a souvenir knife/spear they had bought.

· We then had more than an hour to wander the 50+ duty-free shops. Patrick waited with the bags, while Stephanie, Carol and I checked out the trade. I found one of the things I had been looking for all week … a necklace of paper, made by children in a workshop … and a tee-shirt with beaded fringe which I had adored. Got the first but the second ran very small and I had to abandon the concept.

I was reviewing my notes this morning from my pre-trip interviews with regular visitors to Africa. Almost all said two things consistently:

· This will be a life-changing experience, and it has been. I will definitely get involved in a charity to support the people we have met. Probably a charity that digs wells in villages where the women walked 10-12 miles to bring 1-2 gallons of water home for their families.

· At some point, you will have a heart-stopping moment. We have not. Which I consider a good thing.

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