Road Trip

T's mother came to visit us last week for the Thanksgiving holiday.  Naturally, we wanted to show her a good time so T worked really hard to plan two short trips that would show off the best of Kenya.  The first was a road trip to Amboseli National Park.  To avoid as much paralyzing traffic as possible, we embarked at nearly 5:30 in the morning.  Through the growing light, we saw the Kenyan landscape continuously transform before our eyes from cityscapes to village markets, across lush farmlands and dusty dry savanna.  About 5 hours later, we arrived in the park just in time to enjoy an outdoor lunch at the Ol Tukai Lodge, our home away from home for the next two nights.  The lodge sprawled across well maintained lawns with picturesque trees framing amazing views of Mt. Kilimanjaro, seen right from the doorstep of our room.  With exception to a misunderstanding regarding our reservation and a large male baboon making a startling visit into our room, our stay was very comfortable.

Throughout our time in the park, we enjoyed astonishing luck with the amazing array of animals we were able to see on safari.  There were of course plenty of elephants, for which Amboseli is most famous for.  But we were even fortunate enough to see a pride of lions just hours after arriving.  At some point during our last evening in the park, we tried to write down all the different kinds of animals we could remember seeing and easily filled up the entire page.  I so wish that my literary skills were eloquent and poetic enough to serve proper justice to our experience.  But alas, I'm only confident that I would use an overabundance of "amazing" and "breathtaking" and other cliche adjectives that would only bore you to tears.  So instead, I present to you a highlight reel of the photographic evidence we were able to bring back.  I think they're definitely worth more than any of the thousand words I could think to use.