On our way to Africa(y)
So the trip actually starts with us flying non-stop from GTCtoNYC (yes, a bit ironic, deal with it).
We get to our hotel in SoHo ready to shower and have the most productive and thrilling start to our trip but, of course, the room isn’t ready and our phones are dying. Nothing we can do there so we power through. First on the list is buying luggage because even before we started, both our bags broke on the way to the airport in Guatemala. We go to one of those random luggage stores in the city, some candidates but nothing convincing, Macy’s, nothing, North Face, way to expensive, lucky for us everything was sold out because of 4th of July sales. A COVID test and a couple of Starbucks coffees later, we purchased our bags and back to check-in to the hotel we went. We found an Eagle Creek wheeled duffle bag which we highly recommend for these sort of trips where weight is restricted (it only weighs 3lbs), the bag needs to be durable, and you need to pack a lot of things. We knew we were carrying too much weight the moment both our bags broke so we decided to unpack and re-pack eliminating any non-essentials. Once done, we realized there was nothing in the “leave behind” pile so we went to dinner and decided to cross the weight limit bridge when we get there. Our last supper was an amazing sushi at Blue Ribbon that we will keep in our hearts and minds every day until we get back to it.
Wednesday July 15th and we are ready to fly out to Kenya. We get to JFK and everything goes smoothly, security is short and we stock up on snacks for the 14hr flight ahead of us. Panic settles in when we find out there is no wifi available on the flight and we haven’t downloaded any entertainment. We attempt to download a few movies using the airport wifi but that failed miserably so onto the plane we go. Everyone’s in their seats, doors close, and, we have an empty middle seat people! This was the biggest win we could ever hope for. I’ll spare you the detailed description of a 14hr Kenya Airways flight to Nairobi because there isn’t much to it: on-demand movies available on the seat-back TVs and airplane food, that pretty much sums it up.
I’ll let you know how Tanzania goes next.
