Our final camp in Kenya was at Mhali Mzuri, one of Richard Branson's properties. And it was awesome! The staff, the tents, the food, the guide were all awesome! We thoroughly enjoyed our 4 nights here, full of game drives and family bonding. The kids have gotten really good at hearts!
Our trip back was kind of a nightmare though. We left Mhali Mzuri and flew to Nairobi where we spent the night at Hemingway Hotel, which was super nice. We also ate at a great place for lunch called Tamarind.
The following day we flew from Nairobi back to Accra, where we had to overnight because our Delta flight didn't leave til the following day. We slept at a hotel called Tang Palace hotel. Our room smelled awful and I wish I would have had the foresight to ask for a different room but I figured one night no biggie (we had 1 room for the four of us, a suite, w a bed upstairs and 2 beds downstairs). We had dinner in the hotel that night at this Chinese restaurant. The food was pretty mediocre except for the pork dish (which I ordered) was downright nasty. I sent it back but still ate a bite.
At around 2:30am, I woke up with my glands salivating (not in a good way) and tossed and turned for a few minutes until I started gagging from the smell of the room. I ran to the bathroom and proceeded to empty the contents of my stomach. After I got to the dry heaving stage, I couldn't stay in the room w that smell so I got dressed, went to the lobby and just laid down on a couch until about 6am when I went back to the room, awoke the family and packed up and went to the airport. While waiting to board our Delta flight, we got the announcement that boarding would be delayed due to the Delta system outage. Long story short, we were delayed 4 hrs in Accra (I slept most of the time when I wasn't running to the bathroom). We finally boarded and I proceeded to sleep 9 of the 11 hours (except for the trips to the airplane bathroom, fun fun). When we landed in NY it took us about an hr to get thru customs and immigration, get our bags, re check them, then sprint to the gate where we made what we thought was final boarding for our delayed connection (we ended up sitting at the gate for an hour or so waiting for other passengers). When we finally landed in LAX at 2am, we waited 2 hours for a fucking gate! Pardon the f bomb but that was totally ridiculous. We ended up not even waiting for our baggage because we all just wanted to get home, which we did finally at 5:30am. Door to door, when we left Mhali Mzuri, we got back home 77 hours and 46 minutes later. Ouch.
Despite the rough journey home, we all had an amazing trip and will have the memories for a lifetime. Thank you all for reading. If anyone would like to see photos of the trip, feel free to email me: coop_20007@yahoo.com
