We Made It!

We have arrived!! Our flights went well, and actually passed more quickly than we had imagined. We left Seattle without incident and enjoyed watching movies on the 4.5-hour flight to Washington, DC (The Hoax and Shrek 3). We arrived a bit early to DC, and had no trouble finding some tasty sandwiches and our next departure gate. We met Bill and Elisabeth Stagg at the gate – they had been waiting there much of the day after their early morning flight from RDU.

Our flight from DC to Johannesburg left quite late, as the little shuttle-busses that taxi people from the terminal to the plane were quite slow, so we got settled into our seats (in the next-to-last row) and had plenty of time to get settled. We took off about an hour late but enjoyed a really comfortable flight (about 15 hours). We were fed well, enjoyed more movies, and Elizabeth even slept for several hours with her fancy new neck pillow.

We arrived in Johannesburg full of adrenaline/excitement and made it through customs and passport control with no trouble – as soon as we found our suitcase, we walked through the terminal doors and immediately saw Peter and Elizabeth Storey waiting to meet us. We found our hotel shuttle and got settled in at our very nice room before meeting for dinner with the whole group (Barbara and Joaquin were already at the hotel).

Tomorrow morning, we will head out to the game reserve, where we are told we’ll even get to see our friends Andy and Emily Oliver, who are at the tail-end of their own South Africa trip! We are really excited about that, even though we are not 'guaranteed' to see animals - any wildlife we see will be really thrilling. We’ll spend a few nights at Pilanesburg before we move on. We couldn’t be more excited!

Here’s a few photos from our plane window, coming into Johannesburg:

The view of the outskirts of Jo'burg from the plane. It is a GIGANTIC city.

If you look pretty hard, you can see the outline of downtown (from the airport) through the smoggy haze.

Now we're off to get some sleep so we can be wide awake for wildlife-watching tomorrow. Hopefully we will have another internet connection and some good luck with the animals so we can post more photos and adventures in the next few days!