Been a long time....

Well, I won't say that I'm going to be back to blogging on a regular basis just yet, because I've got a bit more traveling to do before that will happen. I'm sorry to my readers that I fell off the map, but when Michael was killed in December, some part of me died too, and for whatever reason, I found it particularly hard to face a blank screen, to stare at the opening into the internet and put out my thoughts and musings on quilting at that time. For a time, everything in my life seemed so trivial and pointless and everytime I sat down to write about some quilting thing, all I could think of was him.
Here I am, six months later, and I am moving forward, albeit slowly, and while I manage my cheerful facade most days, the trouble with grief for me seems to be that it's sneaky, waiting for some seemingly innocent thing to remind me of the permanence of loss.
Many of you know, from my main website, www.ltquilts.com, that I have recently returned from a trip to Kenya with my mom and my husband. My mom and I have wanted to go on photo safari since I could utter the word cheetah, and we just never had. Michael's death made us decide that if you want to do something, and it really matters, sometimes you just do it, because life really is short, and you really never know how short until it's too late.
Kenya was magical and seeing such amazing creatures and such beauty was good for my soul. I could write for days and days about everything we saw and experienced, but I won't make anyone endure that.
So here are a few of my favorite pictures and a brief explanation of each.

These elephants were kind enough to stroll in front of the acacia trees and Kiliminjaro...More importantly, Kiliminjaro was showing her peak, a rare thing, apparently, and we got to see her both days when we were in Amboseli Park in southeast Kenya. We saw lots of beautiful creatures there, but the most memorable were the large herds of elephants.
This is another elephant from Amboseli. This was one of a very large herd that we happened upon around dusk on the road. They were all in good spirits and didn't mind us quietly sitting in our Landcruiser snapping photos...This female seemed to keep her eye on me, and she was "right-handed" though you can't see in the photo. Elephants have a dominant "hand" like humans, which you can tell because one tusk is almost always more worn than the other. They also curl their trunks that direction.
Hyenas get a bad rap, but I love them. This beauty just melted away into the grass at Amboseli, but she was kind enough to give me a couple good shots. Kenya has had horrible drought the past five years and last year they lost more than 85% of their livestock and vast numbers of wild animals as well. Many herds haven't recovered, and we were told that we were lucky to see as much as we did in Amboseli, one of the hardest hit areas. Predators suffered as much as grazers, so we saw very few hyenas, lions, and cheetahs, and we didn't see any leopards.

This is a pair of white rhino males fighting at our second camp, Lewa Downs. Lewa is a privately owned ranch that has almost single-handedly brought back both species of African rhino, the white and the black. It was my favorite camp. Our guide, Mungai (sp?!) was fantastic, the lodgings were wonderful, and the rest of the staff were great fun and so knowledgeable. The owners even eat meals with you! I will definitely be going back there someday! They have a marathon to raise money for their foundation (which in addition to conservation of wildlife, builds schools, clinics, and helps with all different resource management, including water). It's the only thing that has made me want to run another marathon. We saw tons of rhinos as they have excellent security and have been able to combat poaching more effectively that some of the national parks.
This is four of a group of six black rhinos we saw two days in a row at Lewa. Look at the horn on that mama! Black rhinos are aggressively anti-social and will charge just about anything (including cars and horses) and it is very, very rare to see them in any kind of group, so we saw something that the camp people said almost no one has ever seen. Lewa had horseback riding and our last morning, Erik and I went for a ride and came across the mother and calf on the right in the photo. They always either charge or run, and it looked as if she was going to charge, but if you hold your ground, often, they turn away, but if you run, they try to gore you. So, our guide on horseback, Romano, says to Erik, who is right behind him, "Don't let your horse run if she charges", to which Erik said, "This is my third time on a horse!" and started laughing. Luckily, she didn't charge.

These male cheetahs are Lewa's other claim to fame. My mom and I recently watched the discovery series "Life" (narrated by Oprah), and for those of you who watched it, you may recall the rare phenomenon of cheetahs hunting together and they had great footage of three male cheetahs bringing down and ostrich. These are two of the now quite famous "Three Brothers". Mungai tracked these guys ceaselessly because if I could only see one animal in Africa, I wanted to see a cheetah, and so he found me their famous boys. They were never nice enough to get all three together for one closeup, but I got some great shots of them (see below). One was hurt, but they said that in the past, the other two have always taken care of the injured one, allowing him to survive. Seeing these beauties was worth the whole trip.
Sleepy boy.

They just look like they're built for speed.
Looking for their next meal.
Our last day in Lewa, we were on our way to the air strip (a bit of flat land with a bit of gravel)
when we happened to see some very wary zebra. Wary zebra are usually a good reason to look around. So, upon close inspection and some creative driving by Mungai, we found a mama lion (not in the picture) catching her breath after taking down a warthog for her cubs. It was the best farewell (except for the warthog, too bad for him).
Finally, our last stop, the Maasai Mara. Our first morning on the Mara, our poor guide is driving us around, and he's new, only 2 years on the job, and we've seen a lot already, so there's less new stuff to tell us, and we're in grass that's thigh high and he gets a flat tire. No problem, one of the vehicles from one of the conservation groups comes along and helps because tourists are not allowed on foot in the parks primarily because with that grass, there can be a lion two feet away, and unless he wants you to know he's there, you don't. So, we continue on, and stumble upon a group of eighteen lions that we could see, feasting on a rather rotten dead hippo. Amongst those eighteen were the two beauties above, and believe it or not, there are two males behind them in the shrubs. Four big males. We're driving around to get a better look, and I feel a thump, lean out of the car and see yet another flat tire. My mom is ecstatic, because if we have to wait forty-five minutes for a car from our camp to bring us another tire (some vehicles are equipped with two spares, and now we know why) why not wait where we can look at lions. After quite a bit of chatter, she realizes that we are stranded amongst eighteen lions who can disappear at will, popping up somewhere else entirely, the soft breeze hiding their every movement. When the tire finally arrived, we had armed guards and a ring of other guide vehicles to protect our poor guide while he changed the tire. It's easy to forget, when you can drive right near wild, dangerous carnivores, that they are in fact killing machines. And lions are notorious for killing for fun. But we survived, hooray!
The coolest thing about our stay on the Mara was our camp, Olananna, is situated right on the Mara river. And I mean right on it. We had eight-strand, heart-attack voltage hot fence two feet off our tent's deck (yeah, our 'tent' had a deck, and a flush toilet--not quite roughing it) and we woke up to the grumpy harumphing of hippos as they got back in the water every morning. I love hippos! Here's one of the only shots I got of them out of the water as they are mostly nocturnal, coming on land to feed at night and staying in the water and resting and making noise all day.

Yeah, that is me feeding a baby elephant at an elephant orphanage in Nairobi on our last afternoon in Kenya. Go ahead, be jealous! They raise the survivors of poaching, and increasingly, babies that fall into wells and their mom's have to abandon them. They can guzzle a bottle in a few seconds, so it was hard to get a picture, but I got to play with them a little too, and one threw dirt at me with her trunk. One grabbed my hand with her trunk. It was really a phenomenal experience, and you can see that I am one happy camper.

And lastly, I can now die happy. I have been kissed, and thoroughly licked, by a giraffe. In Nairobi, there's a giraffe center that's for education, but also to breed the rare Rothschild giraffe and reintroduce them to the wild. This one, Laura, really likes pellets, and will eat out of your hand. They have tongues like boas--they are big, blue, muscular, rough, and always searching for food--I think our guide said their tongues can be up to 50lbs. Many a tourist seemed to find giraffe spit on their hand quite repulsive, but all the while, I was thinking to myself, "If I put a pellet between my lips, will she lick my face?" and sure enough, the guy working there sees my giraffe loving brain at work and says, "You want giraffe french kiss?" and sticks a pellet between his lips, getting a big ol' kiss. Needless to say, this is just one of about forty giraffe kisses I received, much to the horrified fascination of many other tourists, who might bravely turn their cheek for one. Interestingly, giraffe spit is anti-microbial because they eat so many sharp things--big gashes in their mouth can heal in fifteen minutes, so apparently, as dirty as I was, Laura was cleaning me up. Honestly, put this one on your bucket list.

So that is the brief overview of my trip. Hope you enjoyed, I might put up some more pictures as I go through all of them.
And as always, happy quilting!