Our plan for the next 6 months beginning in November is to head to Valencia by way of Copenhagen and Berlin with a three week safari in Kenya in February. As always, I have created my travel spreadsheet that keeps track of what we have/haven’t taken care of. Last Saturday this is how it looked:

As you can see, other than our flights to/from Europe and the Kenya portion of the trip that we booked through Tropical Ice, not a lot was organized. Luckily for me, I have Sue. (I’m glad he recognizes this.) Last weekend she decided it was time to make decisions and get stuff moving. Over the course of this week, she has booked our flights from Copenhagen to Berlin and from Berlin to Valencia, found us a hotel in Copenhagen, organized our place in Berlin, chose an apartment in Valencia and started the process to get me a Spanish residency visa with lawyer in Madrid. This is the way schedule now looks:

We are left with finding some flights to and from Nairobi. We both feel so much better knowing we have places to stay, flights booked and a really nice spreadsheet 😉

The safari trip has three sections. The first is a “traditional” vehicle-based safari in the Masai Mara. Here is a link to the information about that portion of the trip. The second is a 10-day, 100-mile walking safari through the Tsavo National Park. This is a link to the detailed itinerary. The third is a couple of days lying on a beach on Lamu Island.  We know that this is going to be an amazing, but very challenging, trip and we have already started getting ourselves in shape to do it. I am sure will write more about this in the coming months.

The next things to tackle is getting all the vaccines and medications we will need for the safari. The vaccine list is:

Hepatitis A

Hepatitis B

Typhoid

Diphtheria

Tetanus

Polio

And Yellow Fever

We also need malaria pills, but those don’t involve putting a needle into me, so I am less bothered about that.

The Hepatitis A & B are done together and require two doses a month apart. Sue has already had her first one of those and the Tdap vaccine which is for tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis. I am going to get started on mine as soon as I work up the courage.

We had a fairly quiet weekend. We were planning on going to the Braves / Nationals baseball game with Josh, Liz and Hannah, but it rained all day on Saturday so they cancelled the game. On Sunday, we decided to work on breaking in our new hiking boots so we went on a minor death march. Only nine miles, but wow, Washington has lots of hills!.