[This is the first of a two part blog.]
Steve Baskin
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Each year, 1.5 million wildebeests migrate over 1,000 miles round trip through Central Africa in search of grazing fields. The migration is considered one of the animal wonders of the world.
It is easy to take the concept of “value” for granted. If we want to know what something is worth, we can look at a price tag or use Google. For many items, we know their value without even thinking about it, be it a gallon of gas or a book.
Today, it felt like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. If you understand this reference, you are dating yourself. In the 1970’s and early 1980’s, Mutual of Omaha (the insurance company) sponsored a show called “Wild Kingdom” hosted by Marlin Perkins (sp). It was the first show that Susie and I remember watching that showed potentially dangerous animals from around the world.
Sometimes you look forward to an experience and quickly realize that your pleasure of anticipating the the experience exceeds its actual pleasure. Sadly, this happens more often than we care to admit. At the risk of alienating my audience, I will say that childbirth was one such experience. I had heard countless fathers gush about the birth of a child – “it was the most powerful experience of my life.”
We have been in the far reaches of the Serengeti and have internet for the first time in 5 days, so I will begin to post the blogs I wrote while we were there. Here is the first entry. I apologize that it is a more serious one:
I am already struggling with how to share our days with you. Since we are part of an organized tour, our days feel somewhat sequential. We wake up, eat breakfast and then hop into our safari van. Walter then takes us from place to place while sharing facts and insights on our drives. We see incredibly interesting things and then go to the next lodging option.
One of the first rules of intercontinental travel is to allow for a day of adjustment. When even a difference of three or four hours can screw up sleep cycles, one should not assume that an 8-12 hour difference is easy to overcome.
As I start this, we are driving with Walter, a 5 year veteran of our safaris company from the Kilamanjaro airport to our hotel.
Five years ago, Susie and I decided to embark on an odd adventure – traveling with our four children for 6 months. The boys would start the trip as 14 year olds and finished as 15 year olds. Terrill and Virginia would be 13 and 10, respectively.