Actually, Valentine’s Day is almost over. Mine was pretty good. Mary and I made a salad and some lasagna for dinner. We also had some baked sweet potato and some wine. It was all pretty tasty. For desert we melted some chocolate and dipped strawberries and bananas, fondue style. All in all, it was a very nice dinner. As a Valentine’s present, I “adopted” a pygmy elephant (picture on right) in Mary’s name from the World Wildlife Fund. It came in a cute red bag with the WWF logo. You can “adopt” other animals on their adoption page.

Over the past week we have been making our final arrangements for our next big adventure. Next month (March) we will be traveling to Africa! What started out as a group trip involving 8 people ended up with just 3 of us going: myself, Mary and our friend Virginia. The trip will be 3 weeks with two major legs:

1. Serengeti safari in Tanzania
2. Primate safari in Uganda and Rwanda

I booked the tours through Good Earth Tours & Safaris based in Florida and Tanzania (thanks to Joe of Good Earth for all the help!). I booked our main flights from San Francisco to Nairobi (Kenya) using my miles on United. We leave SFO on March 12 and pass through London and Zurich. The connections aren’t great, but it sure saved us some money. We booked our intra-Africa flights with Kenya Airways. We will fly from Nairobi to Kilimanjaro/Arusha, Tanzania.

We meet up with our Tanzania guide from Good Earth in Arusha. We will spend 8 days on safari in the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, and Lake Manyara. We should have ample opportunity to witness the Wildebeast migration as well as lions, leopards, cheetahs, elephants, zebra, giraffes, etc. We may also visit a Masaai village and perhaps the Olduvai Gorge, “the Cradle of Mankind.” We end the safari back in Arusha, then fly to Entebbe, Uganda.

We meet up with our Uganda/Rwanda guide from Travelust African Safaris (booked through Good Earth) in Entebbe. This will be the starting point of our primate safari, the pinnacle of which will be two treks to see mountain gorillas! We will visit a few parks in Uganda and one in Rwanda. We should see other primates, including chimpanzees. To make sure we see chimps, we will go to the Jane Goodall Institute’s Ngamba Island Sanctuary in Lake Victoria. We will end our primate safari back in Entebbe, then fly back home via Nairobi, Zurich, London and Washington D. C.

Whew! What a trip that’s going to be!