Two years ago today

Two years ago today E proposed. It is my favorite memory of all time. We were in Tanzania at our tent, watching the sunset. It had been a long wonderful day, and E popped the question. I, of course, said yes. I feel so lucky that someone as kind, and thoughtful, and intelligent fell in love with me.

The time spent in Tanzania with my entire family will always be one of my most treasured memories. I've been thinking about Africa lately because it was only two years ago, but so many things have changed. As I read through my journal last week one entry stuck out, it was no different, per se, than any of the other days, but I decided to type it up for my blog. This is unedited, straight from the travel journal I wrote while on the Serengeti.


Day 14 - We've all decided that we love the wake up calls on this trip. The men come to the tents and say "Hello, hello, good morning" until you say hello back. We all love it!

This morning we were up at 6:30. We ate a traditional breakfast (I love the mangoes here) and left on a drive. E was feeling better, so he joined us. I had Kendra, Brandon, my Dad and Eric in my car today. We left and quickly saw a leopard! This was was in a tree far away and was hard to see, but at least we all got to see him.

Then we headed to the West Corridor (near the boarder with Kenya) to watch the wildebeest migration. It was a long dusty road, but I enjoyed myself. Soon we began seeing wildebeest, and then more and more. We stopped in a huge field and watched them all running in one direction. It was really interesting.
After watching the huge herd we drove on. It was getting hot and later in the day so we found a shady lunch spot under a tree. The guides pulled out this amazing picnic lunch and we each had chairs! We had pasta salad, chicken salad, corn fritters, cokes, cakes, bread, cheeses, bandannas and apples. Wow. I'm going to gain a billion pounds. We ate our lunch and got in the cars after a quick family photo.

The road was still dusty, but the sky got a little cloudier, so we were happy about that. Soon Eric stopped the car near all these trees and jumped out. We all followed and found there was a rickety wooden bridge across a river filled with crocodiles and hippos! Holy cow, I felt like I was having an Indiana Joans moment. My entire family walked across thinking it was so cool! The forest on the other side was really interesting too, it looked like it was straight from Tarzan. We walked down to a beach area and looked across to see the crocodiles sunning themselves. We walked back across the bridge and I asked Peter why there were droppings on the bridge, he said that the baboons use this bridge too. We loaded back into the cars and went to a couple more view points where there were more hippos and crocs. Each was really neat and we even spotted a colobus monkey, something that is really rare in area. We headed back to camp and I stood on the seats with my entire upper body out of the roof the entire time and listened to my iPod.

As we rolled into camp we realized we had seen every animal that day except a cheetah (which we had seen about a week earlier in Ngorongoro Crater). E and I took a shower in our shower stall with a bucket of warm water and relaxed. At dinner we talked about our favorite parts of the trip so far. We ate banana soup and a full menu of traditional African foods all cooked over a fire, there was no electricity in camp. After saying goodnight to our camp hosts we headed to our tent happy and tired.

I looked up at the most amazing night sky I have ever seen. Then, after getting into bed we fell asleep listening to hyenas in the distance.