First Impressions

We are listening to Josh Grobin’s Christmas CD (not by my request) and drinking Kenyan Chai tea while we sit and chat with our friend, Julia, next to a roaring fire in what is a surprisingly cool environment.

Let’s back up a bit first, though to Friday, November 28th: We left our home in St Catharines at 1pm for a flight that wasn’t suppose to leave until 6pm, but didn’t actually take off until 7pm – an hour late because that’s how long it took to board all of the families with small children! We made a final stop at Tim Horton’s, gave the bank a bunch of extra money (yes, that sounds nice, but really it was the expensive US dollars) and then turned our van into a mini-rocket. The whole time we were in the car, frankly, I was wondering “What’s the rush … we’ve got, like, hours!?” After all, according to the airline’s website, we didn’t have to be at the airport until 5pm. But God knew what we didn’t – that we had (ok, I had) read the wrong page for our baggage allowance and we would have to spend close to an hour shedding 18 kilos from our baggage! I began to unpack all of the heaviest or most obvious things I thought we could do without, while Taryn stayed completely calm and collected. For those of you who know Taryn, or if you are Taryn’s mom, you’ll appreciate the humour in that last part … poor Taryn didn’t want to part with anything she had brought for the children! But thankfully, this was the most difficult part of our journey. The airline provided us with 4 delicious meals and multiple snacks (including ice-cream), hours of on-demand movies, plenty of coffee and soda, as well as friendly service throughout the 18 hour trip. Unfortunately, sleep and bodily comfort were reserved for first class only – my knees were scrunched up against the seat in front of me and it nearly hit me in the nose whenever the person sitting in it would lean back (which was often).

Within an hour of being off the plane (we arrived at 9:30pm on Saturday), we hit the road to spend a couple nights with our friend, Julia, at the Backenhurst Convention Centre in Timuru, which is just outside of the capital, Nairobi. En route, we got a tour of down town Nairobi, saw a traffic accident, and went on a hair-raising hour-long taxi-ride that was reminiscent of the many life altering taxi rides we experienced in Central America. The only marked differences were that the driver sat on the right hand side of the car and we drove on the opposite side of the road. There were many times I was sure we were going to get into an accident – but it was me that kept forgetting that they weren’t driving on the “wrong side of the road”, but were actually on the correct side. Thank goodness for that! We also noticed that no one uses their signals here – everyone just inches their vehicles into the spot where they want to be. This makes for extra adventurous highway driving since all of this happens at ‘ridge racer’ speeds.

We were pleasantly surprised when we arrived at our destination, partly because of relief, but mostly because of the lovely country house overlooking Nairobi and the surrounding tea fields. This takes us back to the beginning of our story ….. as it turns out, we stayed up until 2am visiting with Julia and then slept in a comfortable warm bed until 1:30pm the next day! Taryn was like a child on Christmas morning as she took her first look out of the gated windows to see what she couldn’t see the night before ….flower garden after flower garden!! To no surprise, it didn’t take her long to run out and start snapping away. Julia also took us to a beautiful spot overlooking the Rift Valley, where we got to snap more pictures and visit some local businesses (or rather, they came running to us!). After that, Julia took us to a mall that was all decorated up for … Christmas! We ate at a Thai restaurant owned by some friends of hers where we ate whole fried Tilapia! Yum! Another night in the country home on a comfy bed and now we are getting ready for PACE to pick us up and bring us to our destination in Nyahururu. We thank God for providing us with this little piece of refuge, and we are looking even more forward to meeting our new friends at PACE in just a couple of hours!!