Wild Places and Open Spaces

Wow, feels good to be back writing this blog! It has been 6 years since our year long adventure, and although we have travelled a few places since then (Florida, Texas, South Carolina, Washington D.C., Maine, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Moose Factory/Moosonee), and had amazing fun together with family and friends, no place has quite the allure as our next adventure….SOUTH AFRICA!!!!

So you are probably wondering how all this came about for us. Well, it was a surprise to us! It is quite an incredible story…..

Last year, we were invited to Jim’s friend’s home for dinner. Per and Jim have been friends since they were 6 years old. Per and his wife Jacquie have 2 boys, Dylan (grade 9) and Kyle (grade 6). It had been a while since we had last seen them – you know how life gets busy – and we enjoyed a wonderful dinner together that Jacquie had prepared. Right after dinner, Jacquie and the boys excitedly asked Jim to open up his birthday present that had been sitting wrapped on the table since we had got there. Jim opened up the card first, and after reading the message, he blurted out, “I’m not 50 yet!!” Per said, “I know, I know, but you’ll understand later when you figure out the gift. The card actually gives the gift away, so try to figure it out before you open it!”  Well, the card had a cartoon character on the front, saying something about turning 50, and on the inside there was a punch line with a picture of a globe and an arrow pointing to Africa. After some discussion and seeing that the wrapped gift looked like a book, Kristin said, “I know, it is a Fodor’s guide to Africa!” Per gave Kristin a high five, and Jim opened the gift – it was a guide book to Safaris of Southern Africa. Jim thanked them, saying this is great, someday we’ll get to Africa. It was then that the family was all smiles and Per said, “Well….that is not the only gift. We’d like to take you to South Africa!” Dumbfounded, Jim looked at Kristin and then back at Per, and said, “WHAT?” Per said, “Yeah, we’re going to take you to South Africa….we’ve been there and we know you’d love it there, and we’d love to go with you….you only turn 5o once!” Well, needless to say we were speechless.

The year to follow was full of excitement and planning. Per looked after booking our flights and since we are able to take more time off at the moment than what Per’s family can, we extended our trip an extra couple of weeks (you only live once, right?). We’ve never been to Paris or London, so we factored in 4 days in both on the way to S. Africa. We’ll meet Per and family in London and fly over together.  We’ll spend 5 days in Cape Town, separate for a couple of days ’til we meet up again in Sabi Sand Reserve. Here we’ll stay in an absolutely gorgeous resort (way different from the tent that Jim and I usually travel in!!) spending dawn and dusk doing safaris for 4 days. After this luxurious retreat, we’ll say goodbye to our friends and head out on the road spending the next 6 days at camps through the well known Kruger National Park.

How can we ever thank our friends enough for this incredible opportunity?! When we tell people of this trip, most often the first thing out of their mouths is, “How do we get friends like that?” We are so very fortunate. We are so excited to go on this adventure with them – the memories we’ll have together will be incredible and forever ingrained in our hearts.

A bonus to all of this (yes, it is amazing that it can even get better!!) is that while in London, we’ll be staying with a couple (Sue and Rob) that we met while on our year-long adventure while we were in Fiji! We haven’t seen them since 2007, and when we contacted them to let them know we’d be in town, they immediately invited us to stay with them. We are so looking forward to seeing them again and rekindling the fun we had when we first met.

So, all in all, we are the luckiest people in the world.

Depending on internet connections and overall exhaustion (we plan to make the most out of each day!!) we’ll do our best to keep our blog updated and add a few pics too  – no doubt we’ll take thousands.

See you in Paris!

We’ll post photos here.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2013 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.