We waited forty years for this

Chattanooga, Tennessee·Jun 2025

We put this off for forty years, for reasons that all seem fairly thin now: money, then children, then work, then a run of years where it simply never came up.

Tarangire in June was the surprise of the trip. Everyone books Tanzania for the Serengeti and we did too, but the river in the dry season pulls everything in, and we sat one afternoon and watched something like three hundred elephants come down to drink in family groups, one after another, for two hours. Junie cried. I am told I did not, and I am letting that stand.

The baobabs are worth the trip on their own. Nobody tells you that.

On the practical side: we are not young and we were treated with patience but not as invalids, which is the balance we wanted and rarely get. The Arusha office answered every one of my emails, and I sent a great many of them, some of them at unreasonable hours.