Our two weeks in Africa were JAM-packed. We came home utterly exhausted, but I think that is the sign of a trip of a lifetime. We fit in as much as we could. I wouldn't call it a vacation necessarily because that implies lots of relaxation and luxury and often all-inclusive style stays. Instead this trip was more of a backpacker style trip where we lived out of backpacks, stayed in simpler places, and spent many, many, many hours on buses, planes, boats, taxis, etc. Thank goodness for compression socks.

Being able to see Kate and an incredible number of animals made up for all of those transport hours though.

Transportation Tally:

We spent 4 days in Chileshya, Kate's village. It was rough for us, no lie. We are used to the amazing comforts of our home here in Michigan. I am just stunned at the conditions Kate has managed to live in for 2 years now. No running water, no electricity, cooking over charcoal, an outhouse for a bathroom (with no lights and plenty of spiders), spiders and critters on the walls/floors in the house, and when the sun goes down you are stuck with what you can do with a headlamp.

I also had to adopt somewhat of a mantra to get through the trip. I started repeating it about a week before our trip and said it every day and I truly think it helped me deal with the critters. So here it goes (I would say it fast and repeat it a few times) :

It's just a spider. Or a butterfly without wings.

That silly little phrase helped me stay calm and I recommend it to all my fellow spider-fearing-friends. :)

I will go into further details about Kate's village and all of our activities in later posts because for today I am just giving an overview of our trip.
After Kate's village, we took a few buses to get to Livingstone and we had a fabulous time in Livingstone with Kate! While there, we went on a safari, a fishing trip, and we visited Victoria Falls. Some seriously epic images and videos coming your way soon!

We then bused it back to Lusaka and flew home! After getting home I came down with the flu and jet lag, so it has been longer than I was hoping it would be for me to be able to share some images or video with you all! But the time is finally here! So here are few images from Kate's village to get us going! (We have tons of images and video to share in the future!)