Posted June 25, 2022: Sara and Celia are sleeping. I think Sara was up late with her first look at a TV in nearly a month. She’s actually not much of a TV person, mostly alternating between her real and iPhone lives, but I think the lure of a separate (from her kindly but not-always-exciting companions) living room comprised of windows overlooking Cape Town—Table Mountain and Lion’s Head in the background—and the big screen may have overwhelmed her after our series of mostly humble abodes. It certainly did me. To bed early with sparkles of night lights in the dark sky and the steady hum of central heat/air.

We’re in a rather luxurious little apartment on the edge of the Muslim district in Cape Town. Morning prayers echo through the still-dark streets. It’s beautiful. The terrible beauty that religions offer. My son Scott just emailed that the youngest son of their best friends of nearly 40 years drowned yesterday on a California beach. A fine strong family with a deep and abiding faith in their Catholic god—who perhaps forgot them for just a careless moment in god-world. I keep thinking of that young man. I haven’t seen him since he was a twinkly-eyed young teen, but he was the family’s ‘different’ child, choosing a entrepreneurial LA lifestyle. He was bright and apparently somewhat restless. So handsome. With the closest and most loving of families. How that family must keep living today? How nearly impossible. I want to go upstairs and wrap Sara in a blanket and never let her out of my sight.

I can’t seem to progress in an orderly fashion with my blog posts on this trip. But then when was travel (or life) ever orderly. My stomach is definitely unhappy with me these last days, but not too much yet. I want to beat it into submission (being the semi-angry person that I am) until it gives me a free pass to feeling great for the rest of the trip. On the other hand this journey is going well, the three of us still like each other for the most part—though this is a massive dose of togetherness for people who all live alone, even Sara in her apartment, well separated from a roommate. The only major breakdown in plans was the plane ride from Addis to Joburg and housing snafu once there. But now they’ll just be tiny travel tales for a blogging wrap-up or totally forgotten. Otherwise all of the big plans made by three very different individuals, desperate to leave the US for awhile, have held. Here are some final Kenyan safari photos. Couldn’t resist.