The LONG, LONG, LONG flight home

We finally arrived home on Friday at 3:30PM Pacific Daylight Time. We left Eagle Island Camp in Botswana over 35 hours ago.

First, there was the Mack Air flight in a six-passenger Cessna from our camp's airstrip to Maun. Then there was the Air Botswana flight to Johannesburg. Yes, there is an Air Botswana, they fly jet aircraft, but they don't have a frequent flyer point program.

Then we had a three hour layover before boarding our SAA flight to NY. The SAA flight was the "killer". It was originally scheduled to fly from J'burg to Dakar, Senegal to refuel and change flight crews before continuing on to NY. But there had been a two day fuel workers' strike in Dakar, so we had to fly to Sal, the airport at the Portugese-owned territory of Cape Verde off the West African coast. There we picked up four SAA flight crews that had been stranded during the strike AND then fly to Dakar where the strike was now over so we could drop off the flight crews.

Altogether we spent 20 hours on the SAA flight, new personal records for flight time for both of us.

Arriving at JFK, we hustled thru customs and hopped over to the jetBlue terminal to catch our flight to Long Beach.

Of course, we had to make a refueling stop of our own at Papaya King. After wolfing down a couple of good NY hot dogs, we enjoyed the DirecTV on jetBlue where we caught up on the news for the first time in two weeks.

It's amazing. The Middle East is in turmoil, the stock market is doing crazy things, Bush is doing his usual bumbling act of traveling abroad trying to play diplomat so he can avoid his problems at home, and there are brush fires in SoCal. Nothing changes.

Time to catch up on sleep, do laundry, let "the boys" in the house, and start editing the photos and video.