This past weekend, we took our first road trip! We traveled all over southwestern Kenya, got to walk through and sleep in a rainforest, and spent some much needed time together as a family.
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| Looking down into the Great Rift Valley |
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| Silly girls in the backseat! |
Word of Rondo Retreat kept coming up as we talked to people about their favorite places to go in Kenya (We're doing an informal survey-trying to put together a "bucket list" of all the places we'd like to visit before we go). Rondo is a collection of cottages that attracts people wanting to escape the busy life of African cities and serious bird watchers from around the world. To our girls, it was simply Fairyland (another post is coming-we took pictures along the route so you could visit it too). The best part was seeing their imaginations completely captured by the gardens and ponds and lush growth that they saw. We had some (LOTS) of family time in the car. We practiced "fancy manners" at each meal, learning the position and meaning of each item on the table; they are especially good at guessing what is for dessert based on what type of silverware is found across the top of the place setting! Each morning we were awakened by the most incredible birdsongs imaginable. The only way to describe it is that it is exactly what you would imagine the soundtrack to a rainforest movie to be like, except in overkill, like you would tell the sound guy to tone it down because it was too much to sound realistic.
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| Tea for two. |
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| Our cottage is on the left, and a small verandah is in the front. |
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| Tea on the porch our first day. |
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| The chapel on the grounds. |
We traveled to exotic locales like the Kakamega Rainforest and the "Car Wash Fried Fish Kiosks" in Kisumu on Lake Victoria (We're not joking-we looked our route up on GoogleMaps and this was the actual name of the place we stopped!). Entrepreneurs literally just backed cars, trucks, matatus, whatever, into the lake and then waded after them and threw buckets of lake water at the vehicles. Claire was also the first to notice that cars were not the only thing being washed, "That boy is completely nippy!" Thankfully her word for naked doesn't translate well into Swahili. We wanted to order something to lend legitimacy to our gawking at the lake, so we ended up with two HUGE, lukewarm coke bottles, which Kirk gamely ended up finishing before we could leave and have our fish-fry matron pause from gutting the catch of the day to take our picture at the edge of the lake and we were off again (with MANY bathroom stops to come). We were just a few hours from the Ugandan border, and every hour we seemed to enter a new biome: lush hill country with overgrown family shambas (farms/gardens), tea estates with sharp tea plants as far as we could see, hot valley villages full of dust, and the dry Masailand of cattle and acacia trees.
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| Rainforest all around. |
We hope you enjoyed the photos posted as we went, it was fun to imagine taking everyone "with" us on the way. We tried to show a slice of life as we encountered it. Here are some more pictures from a weekend that we weren't sure about attempting-everyone we talked to said "Wow, that's too far," or "I'd love to go there, but not with a small family in tow," but our girls truly were troopers and we are so proud of them.
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| Peek-a-boo! |
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| Claire and a giant bug that was (thankfully!) on the outside of her net. |
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This is the general route we took, pay no attention to the incredibly optimistic time estimate that it shows. The trip there took
us eight hours, and back took ten. We're pretty sure that GoogleMaps neglects to factor in cattle crossings, rutted "roads" that
bounce your bones apart, and "Daddy, I have to pee again." Click here for an interactive map of our route. |
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