Greetings, all-
It seems I last wrote in August, so I have quite a bit of activity from Casa Zimmer for updates. This will probably turn into two messages, so we can put a few more photos on the blog site.
Annette’s folks came in for a couple of weeks in early September. Annette and I went out to the airport and left the boys at home. Little Mark wasn’t real happy, and then he stayed awake until we got home. We figured out later that he equated his mom going to the airport with her being gone for six weeks (as she was with Luke’s medevac this past summer). He seemed relieved when we got home, and Grandma and Grandpa Watts got to meet Chris for the first time. He knew them right off, thanks to Annette’s tireless efforts to keep photos of the family in front of the kids during storytime and around the house in general.
After a couple of days’ recovery from the long flight, we took off for a two-night trip to Sweetwaters, a safari camp near Mount Kenya. We wrote about that, I think, shortly after we arrived here in September 2007. It’s the place with the tame rhino, Morani. The boys were excited to see Morani on this trip, but when we arrived the guard at the gate gave us a flyer and told us Morani had died just a week or two prior to our arrival. The boys seemed sad, but I didn’t think much more of it. But when we arrived at the lodge, I hopped out and opened the back door to unload the kids. Annette and the boys weren’t moving, so I started to ask about the holdup until I heard Annette saying a prayer for the rhino’s soul. She finally got out, turned to me and her folks and said, “praying for rhinos wasn’t in the job description when I signed up for motherhood.”
We took off for a game drive right after we unloaded the car, and three minutes out from the lodge came across a herd of elephants. We hadn’t seen elephants since we’d arrived, so this was a treat for us as well as the grandparents. We had a series of great game drives during the weekend, and also got to see some game around the watering hole at the camp.
We had been warned the week before the grandparents came that the wheel bearing on the car would go out in 2-3 months. A week later, coming back from a game drive at Sweetwaters, the wheel bearing went out. The mechanics told us we couldn’t make it back to Nairobi with the bad part, so we had to wait for a Good Samaritan (and garage owner) to send the part back from Nairobi and then have the hotel mechanics install it with hand tools in the parking lot. I don’t think we were much worse for the wear after two extra nights at Sweetwaters, grateful that we weren’t stuck in the middle of the bush someplace.
The second weekend, we spent a night at Lake Naivasha, which is where we go to look at hippos. I told the grandparents we would go for “a hippo ride” at Lake Naivasha. I thought this was understood to mean a boat ride where we’d look at hippos, but a few minutes into our boat ride, Annette’s mom breathed a big sigh of relief and told us she thought she was going to have to ride a hippo. She said if I was going to make my kids do it, she figured she could, too. We had a nice evening in a rented cabin at Lake Naivasha, then spent the next day at Lake Nakuru National Park. We saw another wide variety of wildlife, including thousands of flamingos and a huge black rhino by the lake. Mark and Chris claimed they were eager to eat lunch at Baboon Lookout, where the baboons stole their lunches a few months ago. We decided against it, eating instead at the “Out of Africa Lookout.”
The grandparents spent the rest of their time touring Nairobi and seeing what we do from day to day. They went to the boys’ school and also to The Nest, the orphanage from which Chris came. We ate some local food and Annette took them to some museums. I guess they enjoyed the trip.
Apart from the grandparents in September, the boys and I went on another safari to a place called “The Ark” which is a hotel built to look like…(wait for it…) an ark. We had signed up and paid a deposit before Annette’s OB told her she couldn’t travel anymore. The boys and I did well, and they seemed to enjoy the adventure. The animals are able to come right up the hotel, as the guests are restricted to the inside of the hotel after getting out of the cars. We had a big elephant walk up to the hotel as we were having hot chocolate. We had a nice bush lunch, set up in the middle of the game park. I guess I got some Dad Points, because when we got home and I asked Annette how much she missed us and if she survived okay alone with the puppy, she said, “You could have stayed gone another week.”
Enjoy the photos. Another update to follow,
Mark
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