Africa - Day#1 (Off We Go-6/3/17)

Picture with the Family before Todd and I leave

Saying Goodbye to Kora    :  )

The "Team" traveling from Rockton, Illinois to Kenya

Saturday, June 3^rd, 2017

            I’m over the Gulf of St. Lawrence heading toward Canada’s province of Newfoundland.  It’s where the little wooden boat in the story Paddle to the Sea last sees land, just before being picked up off the coast of the Grand Banks by a French fishing boat.  He had been on a long journey, floating from his humble origin in the Great Lakes.  I guess I’m on a similar long journey.  The top of the clouds, illuminated by the sun, look like the slush and ice during spring break-up on our rivers back home in Illinois.  I love those rivers.  I love those rivers and their lonesome bottomlands.  They’ve become my “next of kin” after the sugar maple, hemlock, and white pine forests of my life-blood in Northern Michigan.  I’m in new territory now though; farther from my home than I’ve ever been.  The journey has just begun, however, as I travel to the flip side…of the planet.  I like that analogy.  It holds various depths of meaning.

            As I travel next to my son at 39,015 feet, ice crystals dot the windows.  I’ve wondered what would happen if we went down.  I don’t think that way to be morbid; it’s just where your thoughts go sometimes.  For the most part, I think like a survivalist though, and so my only regret is that my flint and steel set, for making fires, is buried away in my “check in bag” somewhere in the bowels of this plane.  Those two things are like my security blanket.  If I have those, surely I could survive anything.  Fire is life, and I know fire.

            We go to Africa with an open heart.  Our souls are jars of clay; fragile, but with the capacity to hold more than we can fathom (2 Corinthians 4:7).  To that end we travel to learn and travel to be taught.  We bring muscle and we bring smiles.  As we travel to Kijani Farm within Kenya, Africa to camp these next two weeks, news has reached us that those who went before us had to shore up the thorn hedge that surrounds some of the property.  Apparently the zebras and wildebeests were getting into the herd of cattle that a family from the Maasai tribe was keeping there.  Imagine that; should we be so lucky to see such a thing.  I don’t go to romanticize the wilds, but still, the wild is something to fall in love with; God’s creation unleashed and still yet raw.  We’re out over the Atlantic Ocean now.  Onward we go to the flip side.

            See you along The Way…

O'Hare Airport

Loading my orange bag I've had since 8th grade

The "Team" (Todd, Nyles and John) loading up

Todd and I heading to Detroit to catch the next flight

Over Michigan-The Home State

Ticonderoga, New York - A Classic Pencil

Clouds of Slush

Dinner over Canada

This is it...Over the Atlantic Ocean

Heading to Amsterdam