Hadn't Really Expected To Visit...

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Geo: 39.0516, -77.4831

The planning for this Spring Break trip had been in the works for nearly a year. I had visited South Africa for work soon after Anna was born, thought it was beautiful, and thought how it would be nice to visit again with the family. A good friend of ours is native South African, and met her husband while he was getting his Masters at the University of Cape Town. They have a daughter exactly Anna's age, and we'd often talked about traveling together. I can't specifically recall how the topic first arose of a joint visit to South Africa, but by spring of 2012 we had already decided to all go together and plans were put into place. Given how far we were going and the diversity of things we wanted to see, advance planning was a must and clearly paid off.

We left Brambleton on the early evening of 21 March. We all traveled on the same flight, a direct route on South African Airways to Johannesburg, with a fuel stop in Dakar, Senegal. We shouldn't have been surprised, but once again this flight -- and all of our subsequent ones -- was completely sold out. For a trip exceeding 16 hours in the air, it was none too bad. We all sat together and everyone managed to get a fair amount of sleep.

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