Saturday April 12, 2014
Well, the day we have been talking about for months is finally here. We left our little tin home, well not so little anymore :), at View Point, or the Point as we like to call it, in the desert in Mesa Arizona and headed off to see our one & only granddaughter Piper! (Paul & Dawn too!). Rich & Tammy were kind enough to take us to the airport at 4:30 pm for our 7:40 pm flight to London. (You all know that I like to be early). So we got there in plenty of time to have a little dinner before we took off. Good thing too because the plane food was pretty awful. The 10 1/2 hour flight was a little bumpy at times but over all not too bad.
Sunday April 13, 2014
We got to London about 1/2 hour earlier than scheduled so we had about 5 1/2 hours to kill in Heathrow Airport. The airport is very large and has lots of shopping. Of course I can't afford to shop in Harrod's or Tiffany's or any of the other very high end stores so I mostly walked around and window shopped while Donald slept in front of a big tv with the BBC News on all afternoon.
Then it was time for our next flight at 7:40 pm London time. We were on the largest plane I have ever seen. (I'm a real world traveler you know...NOT). It had 2 stories & we were on the top level which made it a little farther from the motors so it was a little less noisy. I did watch 7 newly released movies on the planes so I guess that means I saved money by not having to go the movies. :)
Monday April 14, 2014
After another almost 11 hours we arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa @ 7:20a Monday. The time difference between Mesa and South Africa is 9 hours so it seems like it took us 2 days to get here but the total was actually 26 hours. Which was plenty long enough. The line to go thru to show our passports & get into the country was very long. That process took about 45 minutes. Once we collected our bags we found Dawn & Piper waiting for us. She has really grown since we saw her at Christmas. She was a little shy but we each had a stuffed animal for her so she warmed up to us pretty quickly. No pictures yet since we were too tired to dig the camera out. We drove back to their house which is about 40 minutes into Pretoria which by the way has an African name of Tshwane (pronounced Tish-wan-ay). Monday is pretty much a blur since we were both exhausted. As soon a Piper went to bed @ 7:45 so did I. I took a sleeping pill & slept pretty well. Donald said he didn't need one & of course he did not sleep at all.
