Thanks to a media savvy reader (thank you Cynthia!) , I was able to email some photos to my Flickr account.  They took about 8 hours apiece to leave my outbox, so there aren’t many at this point.  But a few photos are better than none.  Know that there are almost 1,000 that need to be looked at, organized, and the best will appear on this blog.  It just may take me a bit.

Randy and I are sitting in the Capetown airport waiting for our flight to London.  We will have a 9 hour layover and then finally the flight home to Seattle.  We left the game park yesterday around 11am so when all is said and done, it will take us over 3 days to get home.  The trip has been amazing, more than I can truly process at this point.  We saw and did so much.  We had so much quality time together.  We met some great people.  I read and read and read and read.  Such a luxury.  But now, still 10,000 miles away from home, I am missing my boys so much my heart hurts.  I know they have been well cared for, that their lives continued to follow routine while our lives were drastically different.  What an incredibly lucky woman I am for all that I have, all the love in my life, and all that I can look forward to back home.

First, an apology for no photos. As it turns out, the iPad version 1 is not compatible with Flickr. I could potentially upload photos to another site and somehow get them up on the blog, but that would take a lot of time and brain power – the former I have lots of and the latter I have very little of. So, I promise, there will be multiple posts with more information about this amazing trip and photos that will, hopefully, give a glimmer into what traveling to this corner of Africa is like. (I can’t promise though – I have learned how to use my camera inside taking close up portraits of food but out in the open and trying to photograph cheetahs has been a learning process.)

We are about halfway through the safari portion of our trip. There have been many surprises for us. The first being that we are not in Kruger National Park after all, but a private game reserve called Zulu Nyala, about 200 kilometers south of Kruger. It is hard for me to believe that we traveled so long and so far and essentially had no idea where we were going. Fortunately, the people who were supposed to pick us up arrived on schedule and here we are. I had imagined the three hour drive to the park being in an open-air jeep on dirt roads through the savannah, but in fact we were in a van on a modern highway through incredibly lush, green, rolling hills. Randy thought we would drive through rain forest, so we were both wrong.

At the park, there are two game drives per day, one starting at 6am and one starting at 4pm and on three of them we have seen wildebeests, warthogs, zebras, cheetahs, elephants, hippos, giraffes, rhinos, buffalo, and lots of impala. Also a few spiders that were terrifyingly large with webs the size of small cars. We are still on the lookout for crocodiles and a leopard that roams between this park and the one next to us. This is a Big 4 game park and there are no lions, but we plan an afternoon trip to the park next door to hopefully catch them.

As most people who have seen animals in the wild will tell you, there is no substitute for this experience. Even though this is “game park lite”, meaning that the animals are protected here and we see the same ones over and over, it is still them living in their natural habitat and getting very close to them with a guide who knows a lot about them and their habits. We were lucky enough to see three elephants, a teenager, her mother and her aunt, full on swimming in the watering hole. Not just getting wet on the shore but completely in the water. They were blowing water on each other, tackling each other, huge beings surprisingly graceful and lovely in the water. It was very moving. As they moved to get out, the calf put her trunk on her mother’s back, just as if a child was asking to hold the hand of its mother. I had just read a bit about elephants and how intelligent, social, and family oriented they are, so it was especially amazing to witness this display.

Anyway, more once I am back home and have a few hours (or days) to sort through our images. We are feeling very far away, very thankful to our loved ones who are keeping our children safe and happy, and just a bit homesick.

It might be that, at the moment you are reading this post, I am staring down the mouth of a lion.  Or maybe I am sleeping.  Or, perhaps having a cocktail.  Regardless, I am not sitting in the rain in Seattle.  I am (hopefully) enjoying the splendors of South Africa.  I have made some yummy things in March over the years and I hate to think of those dishes languishing without any one looking at them, so I’m including my favorites here.

If you want to impress, really impress, you should make this Peanut Brittle and Caramel Crunch Ice Cream Pie.  It weighs over five pounds.

Ina Garten’s Garlic Ciabatta Bread and her Roasted Tomato Caprese Salad together in one post!

Mediterranean Roasted Vegetable Salad is one of the first great salads I ever made.

Pizza Bianca and the beginning of my Jim Lahey (he of no-knead bread) obsession.

White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookies – the kind that you used to get at Mrs.Field’s – except about a million times better.

Sometimes you just need a lot of fresh tasting pasta to make the day better.  Jamie Oliver is a really good helper on those days.

In my mind, there is very little that Yotham Ottolenghi does that is not amazing and delicious.  In this dish, he takes two kind of polarizing ingredients, tofu and brussels sprouts, and brings them together in the most delicious way imaginable.

Another dish from Plenty.  So nice when you want a salad that’s a bit different but still light and clean.  Broccoli and Sweet Sesame Salad.