Spring doin's

My dog had puppies on Easter Sunday! Thank the Lord I was able to have them all sold by nine weeks old! The money I got will be a great help toward my college bill this next school year!

We got together with some friends one evening. The gals "jammed" on mandolin, violin, and cello substituting for bass!

One Saturday I took Danny and Hannah to walk in the Walk for life, organized by a local crisis pregnancy center. Unfortunately, I did not see the email telling me when to arrive to register, and we were too late by the time we got there! That was a disappointment, but we made the best of it and spent some time at one of our favorite parks. We call it "the duck pond" because--well, there is a pond with ducks (and geese) on it! We also saw turtles and a heron. In this picture you can see goslings in the water.

These baby ducklings stole the show!

Hannah and I got to help this year at the local fire department's pancake breakfast fundraiser. We were in charge of the kids' table, handing out fire hats and activity booklets.

I took Danny and Hannah birding one afternoon.

We found a tiny nest in a clump of grass after the mama flew off it. Three eggs nestled inside!

I babysat a couple of times for the lady whose restaurant I work at. Danny helped the older girl build a house for our kittens out of cardboard boxes.

The baby liked the kitties too! We just had to make sure she didn't accidentally strangle them!

I took them to the park. The baby liked the swing!

We saw a bluebird while we were at the park!

Of Campgrounds and Catastrophes

 We flew out of JFK the evening of June 1st. While waiting to board, we got some shots of the sunset.

 I think this picture was taken during our all-day layover in Switzerland. We saw this pilot washing his window.

 After arriving in Johannesburg, the boys helped load the trailer with the Bibles we were going to sell.

We stayed the first night at a church compound in South Africa, not far from the border of Botswana.

 The next morning we crossed into Botswana. While going through the border post, we saw a bunch of monkeys running everywhere. This monkey knocked the trash can over and was combing through the contents.

 Some birds we saw in Botswana, at the campground where we stayed the second night.

 Our trip was not without incident. We were driving through Botswana on the third day of our trip, when the vehicle I was in hit a pothole and got a flat tire! The others were ahead of us and didn't realize that we were stopped. Tanni Hester managed to flag down a taxi and asked the driver to try to catch up to Oom Piet and tell him what happened. Then we unloaded all our baggage from the back of the car, since the spare tire was in the back.

Nathaniel set about taking off the flat tire. He ran into a bit of a delay when he realized that one of the lug nuts required a special attachment that we weren't sure we had. After a bit of searching, Nathaniel found the attachment in the glove box, for which we were very thankful! Nathaniel put on the spare tire, only to discover that it needed air. An anti-poaching vehicle with several occupants stopped and offered to take the spare tire to a fuel station a few kilometers back to air it up. 

While we waited for them to come back, Candace and Nathaniel walked back to the pothole that did our tire in. There were a couple potholes that were rather large, as you can see.

Oom Piet finally arrived, just before the truck came back with the aired up spare tire. The men in the truck were even so kind as to put the tire back on! Because of the delay, we had to spend another night in Botswana rather than crossing the border into Namibia that day as planned. We found a place in a campground within walking distance of the Zambezi River. This picture is the next morning, when we were cleaning up after breakfast and making lunches for the day.

We had a little time to connect to the internet and make contact with family back home before we left to cross the border into Namibia. The next post tells about our stay in Namibia and our first adventure in Zambia.