The Flight Down

The Super Shuttle picked us up at 04:40 AM for our 07:30 flight. Believe it or not, we were all ready and packed and waiting! We had reserved one for ourselves as we had 8 pieces of large checked baggage and 6 carry-on luggage between us. Reese may be moving off to Asia to teach English from here in August and I am staying for at least six months to complete the initial research phase for my Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a lot of cloths and things as well.

Our flight was just over 5 hours from Seattle to Washington D.C., and I can assure you that we all slept most of the way there. Not only were we exhausted by early rising, but we had all been furiously preparing for our trip for the past couple of weeks. Our layover in Washington Dulles was pleasant, uneventful, and only two hours. We had time to grab a bit of dinner before our flight. As it turned out, our flight to Dakar, Senegal was only about 7 hours or so. We all slept except for Clay, and the lay over there was just about an hour. From there we had an 8 or 9 hour flight to Johannesburg where we were met by the Thompsons representative before passport control. He quickly hurried us through passport control and on the other side where another Thompsons guy took control of our luggage and passed us onto our flight to Cape Town.

As soon as we got out of customs there was our long lost son, Greg. He has just completed a half marathon at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, then went on a 5 day climb to the summit (over 19,000 feet above sea level). He has a certificate for reaching the highest peak, and a trophy for coming in #1 in his age group. Greg is a consummate athlete and played mostly soccer and tennis through high school, and then played all four years of varsity tennis at college. His goal is to run a marathon on every continent (they have one in Antartica, believe it or not!), and he will probably try to climb more mountains. He has reached the summit of Mount Fuji while living in Japan.

So, we took the 2 ½ hour flight to Cape Town together sitting across the airplane in row 19. We were all very happy to be together and see each other again that we talked all the way there. Upon arrival we were met, again, by the Thompsons people who greeted us and got us off to our hotel.

We checked in and all immediately fell asleep in our separate rooms. It has been a long couple of days traveling, and we were all exhausted! We’re back in South Africa again!!!!!