Birthday Month! — But Where Will You Live?

Anyone who knows me well, OK, maybe anyone who knows me at all, knows I'm all about celebrating my birthday in a big way. I don’t need big trips, or presents, but I do need a lot of celebrating! Back in Colorado my birthday quickly became birthday month celebrating with lunches, dinners, and activities with friends.

Jim threw a lovely braai and invited lots of our friends here and I got so many sweet and beautiful messages from friends afar—I felt all the love!

We started out the month finishing up our trip to Victoria Falls and Hwange National Park and moved quickly into hosting our good friend Colin at our place.

Colin had planned a trip to South Africa for September, 2020 and was just finally getting here after having to cancel the original trip. So we were both super-excited for his adventure. He made us his last stop on his sightseeing adventure through the country. We had a fantastic time hanging out at the house catching up on life, watching Bros (highly recommended!), and going into Kruger for the bush braai with Royal Safaris. It brings me so much joy to share our little slice of paradise with fellow animal lovers! I'm hoping Colin comes back, but like us, he has so many places he wants to see in the world, it's hard to go back to place you've already been. (And let's be honest, it's not exactly easy to get to our place!)

We mostly hung out at home enjoying the backyard animals—other than the game drive/bush braai, and a visit with Tswale, the rescue elephant. If you are interested in learning more about Tswale and his story, you can visit his website. Our friend Sonell is working to buy Tswale from the current owner to ensure Tswale can live out his live free to roam her 2,500-hectare farm and just be an elephant—no performing, no one ever riding him—and we want to support this effort anyway we can!

The bush braai with Royal Safaris is one of my favorite activities to do with friends. It's not the least expensive activity (non-local price is about $100, including park entrance fees), but I find it worth the cost to get a game drive, dinner in the park with a fire, and a mini-night game drive as you leave the park. We don’t really like sharing game drives with strangers so we try to book the entire vehicle for ourselves. We ended up inviting two couples friends to join us on the adventure. We had so many great sightings! I think Colin said it was the best guided game drive he took while visiting Kruger. His other guided game drives were all by the Kruger Park guides and cost way way less.

After adventuring with Colin and having a birthday party for me, we packed up our suitcases to head out on a hectic six week adventure in the States to visit family and friends.

Here is a picture a day from our November adventures…