Sunday, January 6, 2019

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.