Arriving in South Africa

As promised, here is the 1st post to begin the recount of our recent trip to Southern Africa. Before I forget too much about when and what happened, I will just start at the beginning now and try to get through the entire trip by the end of this upcoming month.

After the little escapade of locking myself in the airplane bathroom on the flight from Greensboro to DC, the next flight was a lot more uneventful. Although it was a very looong flight (16 hours) it was actually rather pleasant. We were not expecting all the technological updates that had been made since the last time we took that trip 7 years ago. The last time I was on that flight was actually on my own after college. I had to bring lots of things to keep myself entertained since they only showed two movies on the whole flight, and if you happened to be sleeping during the time they showed them, then you just missed out. However, this time, the entertainment was on demand on a touch screen in the back of the seat in front of you, and they not only had a large selection of recent movies, but they also had TV shows, and even games that you could play using a hand held controller that pops out of the armrest. So we were definitely entertained on that flight.
Since we knew that when we arrived, we would only have a few days with our family in South Africa before leaving for Swaziland, we had purchased some homeopathic pills called "No Jet Lag" to take during the flight so that we would be able to visit with everybody as soon as we got there without the hindering effects of jet lag. Amazingly on the way there the pills worked great!

We arrived in Johannesburg mid afternoon on January 2nd, and met most of our family there at the airport. We piled oursleves and all of our luggage into their cars and headed to my Uncle Willam and Aunt Susan's place. They live in a little town just outside of Johannesburg, and had just recently built a little cottage in their yard for guests. This was to be our abode for the next few days. It was really cute and had everything we would need - A living room, dining room, kitchen, 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. That first night there we just sat around the cottage and visited with family. It was so great to see everyone again and catch up. We all got a great night's sleep to prepare for the very eventful next day...