03
AUGUST 2005 ‚ 2000 HOURS ‚ LOS ANGELES
With use of all of my fingers and toes and what remaining functioning
synapses
I've counted and in the past 27 hours, we spent eight of them at various airports
and the other 19 of them in the air, but it's all behind us know: we're home.
More counting: we flew on 10 different flights during our 2.5 weeks away and
easily clocked more than 20,000 miles.
It was a 10.5-hour flight from London back here, but at least it was made from our roomy window and aisle seats aboard an American Airlines 767. After touchdown at about 2:50 this afternoon we cleared customs, reclaimed our bags and hailed a taxi that whisked us across the 105 freeway to the 110 north to the 101 off at the Rampart exit and in front of our house at a little bit past 4 p.m. where we found my mom who had a welcome home bottle of champagne on ice for us and lamb cooking in the oven. A quick animal inventory yielded all creatures in good health and varying levels of interest at our return, with Shadow winning that category. After eating, I wasted no time in hooking up my trusty Alphasmart device to my desktop and downloading all the entries into this file. Without a hitch. But I'm afraid I just don't have the energy to tackle all the images archived on the iPod.
I suppose I should close with some profound words of reflection, but Susan's already come in and found me passed out once here at my chair (at one point I even awoke from a doze pressing on the arm trying to located the seat's recline button) so the best I can come up with is that I'm pleased that we're all home and all safe here at our journey's end. Goodbye Africa. And goodnight.
