Davis Pictures

I turned  40… again (apparently last year I was only 39… false alarm!)

We had just flown from California, so our body clocks were a little off.  Both girls fell asleep at the table.  I ate an “apple pie” we bought off the street…  It was the 38^th best birthday I’ve ever had!

I turned  40… again (apparently last year I was only 39… false alarm!)

We had just flown from California, so our body clocks were a little off.  Both girls fell asleep at the table.  I ate an “apple pie” we bought off the street…  It was the 38^th best birthday I’ve ever had!

We had some business in Uganda.

I only took one picture.  Just one.  This is it.  In the Entebbe airport:

I was like, “Come on!  It’ll be fun!  We’ll just run into the city grab a banana and come straight back to the airport!’

And he was like, “I don’t know… it seems risky.”

We went to visit our friends in Madagascar.  I’m not sure what else to add.  Except that Antananarivo may have the worst traffic – worse than Nairobi and Kampala.  That’s saying a lot.  When your taxi driver turns the car off and goes to sit in a roadside café leaving you in the traffic jam, you know you aren’t going anywhere fast.

It is also an amazing country in both history and fauna…  Reclusive kings that avoided their company by sitting in the rafters of their houses, lemurs that look like skunks, and chameleons that range from the size of an ant to the size of a squirrel.  Wow.

Pictures:  Newlyweds John and Prisy and a curious lemur; Frazer with the world’s smallest (variety of) baobab tree; Davis getting a selfie with this tortoise (notice how he leaned in), king’s house (with guest-avoiding attic) in front of the queen’s palace.

One of the joys of travelling across the world is the layovers in foreign airports.  What do you do with the time?  The safe thing is to just hang out in the airport, shop the duty free, and try to find the cheapest meal possible (usually out of a vending machine.)

But if you are audacious, you take your chances, dash out of the airport and seek adventure on a tight timeline!  This is my modus operandi!  It’s how I fell asleep on a park bench at Buckingham Palace, or ended up eating in a homeless shelter in Brussels.  My family has adopted this idea too – which inspired us to make a stop in Doha once, to jump the train into Zurich just long enough to have a cup of coffee and our most recent stop: Amsterdam.

We had just four hours in Amsterdam, but we had just read “The Hiding Place” by Corrie Ten Boom and it seemed a shame to pass through without visiting the Ten Boom house, and to see the hiding place with our own eyes.  So we went through passport control, dropped our bags at luggage storage, jumped into a taxi and sped to Harlem.  We found the house… or really the door.  That’s it.  You have to make an appointment, which I had tried a couple months’ previous, but they told me “sorry, that day is fully booked.”  But I thought we could at least see the gift shop.  But no.  It’s just a door into a very tiny house, and it was closed. 

So we stood there.

And took a picture.

Then the door opened.  “Are you here for the tour?  We are expecting a larger group!”  I explained that we were not that group, but that we would happily take the tour.  The docent, said, “well if they aren’t here in 10 minutes you can take their place.”  10 minutes later, we got the tour, and an hour later our new friend, the Moroccan taxi driver picked us up, whizzed us back to the airport, where we reclaimed our bags, labored through security, and caught our plane to Kenya!

Best 4 hour Amsterdam layover vacation ever!