2/25/08 This is the night before we leave Park Sierra to drive to the Bay Area to start the long travel process which will get us to Johannesburg, South Africa and ultimately Pretoria on the 28th. Tomorrow, after closing up our rig, we will meet Elaine's daughter, Tarra, in Fremont for a late lunch. Then we take BART up to the San Francisco Airport and a shuttle to the Travelodge where we will stay tomorrow night. We have to be back at the airport by 6 AM on Wednesday to catch a flight to Dulles, where we pick up our South African Airlines flight to Johannseburg. The whole process takes about a day and a half and costs $1260 each. Now you know why we want to stay there for nearly 3 months - dollar cost averaging. It will be a long flight and we hope we can weather it well.
Of course, we have been using this very rainy week to pack and do paperwork, getting ready for our departure. Happily, we also had a nice visit with my oldest granddaughter, Paige. We picked her up at her other grandparents' place in Merced on Monday and took her back there on Wednesday. Besides teaching her to make pizza (see below), and playing games, we also took her thrift store shopping on her way home. We got a few things for our trip and she got some new tops and everyone had a good time. She is now swimming for her new high school team and has made some new friends there.
Don't know if you can tell from the picture below that Elaine has almost totally healed from her run-in with the slideout. She just has a little red spot in the middle of her forehead and a small scar which you have to really look closely to see. She is a tough Broad, isn't she?!
Thanks everyone for all the caring and supportive messages you sent which aided her recovery.
The next message will be from South Africa, where we hopefully will be having exciting adventures enabling us to write a more interesting travelogue.