Three generations in one vehicle

Silver Spring, Maryland·Jul 2025

Nine of us travelled: my parents, my brother and his wife, us, and three children between six and fourteen. My mother is eighty-one and does not do heat. My nephew does not do sitting still. I genuinely did not know whether this would work.

What made it work was the planning, which took about four months of back-and-forth email with Arusha and never once felt rushed. They put us in two vehicles instead of the three we had asked about, which kept the family together, and they built in a rest day at Tarangire in the middle that we would never have thought to ask for. My mother spent that day on a shaded deck with a book and a view of elephants at the river, and she still talks about it more than the game drives.

The children did the Kids Wild Adventures sessions and came home able to identify a dozen birds and tell you what a dung beetle does, which they now do at length, at dinner, to anyone.

We had one flat tyre and one afternoon of rain. Both were handled before we had finished worrying about them.