Today, we travel about 140 miles southwest through Kenya’s fertile highlands before descending the Rift Valley Escarpment toward the legendary Maasai Mara National Reserve. As the landscape opens into vast green grasslands, I glimpse the abundant wildlife that makes the Mara a renowned safari destination.
The Maasai Mara lies in southwestern Kenya, where the Great Rift Valley opens into a vastness hard to comprehend. A vastness only interrupted by Acacia trees dotting the plains, some wooded hills, and animal herds. Established as a wildlife sanctuary in 1961 and expanded and listed as a national reserve in 1967, the Mara has become one of Africa’s most celebrated wildlife destinations.
Sunrise over Mount Kenya and morning visitors at ye ole watering hole.
The Early Bird Can Have the Worm
I know animals emerge early – the African version of the early bird catches the worm. Dawn becomes prime time for wildlife, when the air is cool, the animals are active and the chances of seeing something exciting are at their best.
I depart north for Sweetwaters Serena Camp in Ol Pejeta Conservancy. The combination of game drives, a chimpanzee sanctuary, looking for rhinos, conservation stories, and sleeping in a tent assure me of a particularly interesting couple days.
The drive itself becomes part of a great experience. Once out of the traffic jams of Nairobi, we slowly crawl down a two-lane road. While basically smooth, speeds are consistently slowed by big highway humps. No speeding here! Villages dot the highway with very simple markets and lots of activity. We hear this represents a good road in Kenya.
Getting to my destinations seems to become harder every time I fly. Perhaps it is the airlines, perhaps it is my advancing appreciation for sleep, or perhaps I have simply become less willing to pretend that a 36-hour journey is “just a long flight.”
Clear skies over home.
These days, a lack of confidence in airline schedules means building extra time into the journey – longer layovers, generous connections, and, when necessary, an overnight stop. The trip may take longer, but at least I have a fighting chance of arriving with some semblance of a functioning brain.
September 2026 I continue to hope to find the name of my 4Xs great grandmother. Women’s roles were hard work, birthing children, then anonymously dying. Unless from a family of wealth or importance, many women only represented a number in a census before 1850. The woman I seek was born Read more
I visit Richmond expecting one large history lesson rather than separate attractions. How closely do power, economics, race, government, religion, memory, and the physical landscape connect.
Historic Richmond with its brick and cobble streets and facades couldn’t look lovelier. However, under the surface and historically, Richmond proves slavery and the Confederacy were not abstract ideas.
Each represented systems built into a real city and its businesses, government, streets, cemeteries, banks, churches, warehouses, railroads, and people’s lives. So, I explore Richmond and keep asking: Who had power here? Who benefited? Who suffered? And what happened to those systems after slavery ended? There are always lessons to learn. My goal becomes not simply to understand Richmond as the Capital of the Confederacy, but as a city where enslavement, resistance, religion, medicine, the Civil War, and confederate history all intersected.
After Washington, D.C., Richmond becomes particularly meaningful because it moves me from the museum interpretation seen in D.C. into the actual heart of the Confederacy.
I travel to my nation’s capital to visit my niece and her new abode. Also, to explore two national museums. For the niece, it will be a time of exploring her environment and doing some fun shopping. With a new apartment, I am sure there are items of want. That’s what great aunts are for.
For the museums, there are plenty to see in D.C. The Smithsonian currently has 17 free museums and the National Zoo in the area. (Actually, the Smithsonian claims it has 21 museums worldwide, 17 in the D.C. area.) Just focusing on the area of the National Mall, 11 museums or buildings line its perimeter. I have been to most over the years, so this trip, I concentrate on two in particular.
