I’m sorry that I have been such a “slacker” with writing and showing more photos of my recent Safari Trip, sometimes that damn thing called “life” just sucks up the hours in a day.

We, my group of six, traveled “forever,” well at times it felt like that. Our flight departed Tampa, Florida to JFK, New York to Istanbul, Turkey to Kilmanjaro, Africa. The total time including layovers was 36 hours, can you even begin to imagine that. My God, we were exhausted. We took a van from Kilmanjaro to a hotel in Arusha, Africa (about an hour and a half drive by car), it was the middle of night and I remember the sky was so dark. I could tell we weren’t in Kansas anymore.

We traveled over 800 miles in our Safari Vehicle, stayed at roughly 4 – 5 different hotels, toured 4 different parks and had some really delicious cuisine. Breakfast at each hotel was buffet style, I really miss those little baby bananas and that fresh squeezed passion fruit juice.

Our main hotels were Sopa Lodges (a chain) which blended so well with the natural surroundings. Most were located in the Parks or very near to them. One of the things that was really fun occurred at dinner each night. The restaurant staff would sing and dance throughout the dining room as we were finishing up dinner. Dale’s Mom Betty was so damn cute clapping her hands with a big grin ear to ear. Bi Bi is a nickname for grandmother and she was called that at every place we stayed. We stayed in a Tented Lodge on our last night in Tanzania. It was very rustic but we actually did have electricity. Our tent made me feel like I was on the set of the old TV show Mash, any moment I kept expecting to see Hawkeye or Klinger.

I tried to add some of the music from the CD I brought home from the Sopa Lodge but YouTube wouldn’t let me add it (that whole damn copyright thing). So this is as close as I could find within YouTube’s library, just try to ignore the ad’s (that’s why it’s free to users). Just click on the (X) when you see an Ad pop up.

This video just shows some of the places we stayed. Enjoy…