Getting to Nelspruit

Our African Adventure story begins, of course, with the first flight, which took us directly from Dulles, DC to Johannesburg, South Africa. Obviously this is an excessively long flight. But, to kill the pain, the booze is free. I tapped into this method of pain relief. Owen handled the flight very well, drawing and coloring, watching movies, and eating. As usual on our travels, I was told by several people that I am very lucky for having such a well behaved and quiet boy. I do appreciate this fact very much, though usually there is a spell of roughly a half hour every time where I am not convinced of this fact. But, realistically, this is a really small percentage of a 17-plus hour trip, given that Owen is only 4 years old, and has just dealt with an excessively long road trip, so I should really just quit my inappropriate whining. Things could always be worse (and as I frequently say, this is the greatest form of beauty in the world: the fact that things could always be worse).

I realized during the course of this flight, the potential dangers of traveling internationally as a single parent with a young child. At some point during the flight, I had some sort of an attack that included dizziness, nausea, heart palpatations, sweating, and the general feeling like I was near passing out. Owen was asleep at this point, but as I tried to focus on breathing as settling my racing heart, all I could think about, other than trying to control my heart, was that I had no idea what would happen to Owen if something happened to me. That is a very scary thought. At least on this trip, we have "family" where we were headed, but it is something that I will be very mindful of in the future. I did manage to sleep through the attack and it went away, so I think in some way, it was just a message from the gods to remind me to be very careful.

When we got to Johannesburg, I also realized, for the first of many times to come, how completely ill-prepared I was for this trip. I had no idea what I had to do when I got there and different airline employees kept giving me different information. Plus, the flight was late and the connection to Nelspruit was tight anyway, so what this meant was that I had roughly 30 minutes to get my luggage, go through customs, go through security, and find the flight gate. And the Johannesburg airport is huge and confusing, and I had to navigate all of this while dragging a sleepy 4-year old around. We managed all this, just barely, thanks in no small part to South Africa's excessively lax customs and security. And as I proudly ran up to the gate, just barely on-time, and showed our boarding passes, we were then informed that the flight was late and would board in 20 minutes. Oh irony, you appear in my life yet again. But, this gave us time to change out of our winter clothes into more summer appropriate clothing. So, thanks South African Airways for your late departure, but it would have been nicer if I hadn't managed to work up such a sweat in getting to that point.

Arriving in Nelspruit, was, of course, wonderful, mainly because Walter was there waiting for us. And he, of course, had plenty of alcohol waiting at his home. It is so good to see him again!