What's between Burley and Cape Town?

On the afternoon of January 8th, after several rather frantic packing days, (By the way, it all made it in the bags rather successfully) my travels began. So did a blizzard that took over southern Idaho and northern Utah. My dad drove my mom, me and 2 highly strategically packed 70 pound bags from Burley to Salt Lake City, going about 45 miles an hour through the blizzard. Fortunately, we made it to Salt Lake about 5 hours later with little incident. Here is a picture of the roads at around 4:30 as we were traveling through Idaho:


Here's my last pic with the padres in SLC :( Miss you!

The next morning, I flew from Salt Lake to New York, said a passionate goodbye to my cell phone, looked for a hot dog (come ON New York, no hot dogs in the airport?!) and boarded the plane for London.

London was a bit of zinger - a 14 hour layover.
I was a bit worried about being able to get the news about the U.S. election results - the New Hampshire primary had just turned everything upside down the night before and I was disappointed I would be missing out on all of the juicy post-analysis and projections. So I wandered into a coffee shop as soon as i got into London hoping for a little tidbit of news on the matter. HA! EVERY single news paper in the store had the eleciton news sprawled across its front page. I picked up a copy of the times and there were fifteen - FIFTEEN articles covering the elections in even better detail than I could have hoped from CNN. I was laughing to myself so much I decided to take a few pictures while I drank a delightful chai tea latte.
The Brit perspective on the role of race in the election was fascinating and they committed pages upon pages analyzing why race and/or gender was the reason or not the reason for Obama's loss and Clinton's. Sorry for the crass language in the last photo - I just thought it was so interesting that they decided to use that quote on page 2 of the newspaper, and then highlight it. They didn't seem nearly as interested in the Republican race, and I only saw one article on it in the entire newspaper.

Fortunately, I wasn't left to take pictures of the newspaper for very long (who KNOWS what would have happened), because Victor's cousin Peace picked me up from the airport and took me in for the day. We had a lovely time getting to know one another. I decided I wasn't going to sleep so that I could beat jet lag, but after an accidental 5 hour nap, I just embraced the jet lag and went with it. She cooked me a wonderful Nigerian meal, and I got to play with her kids Victor (godson of my Victor) and Vanessa. Here's a picture of little Victor:

I again boarded the plane, and after a small averted crisis regarding number of bags allowed (long story), I was on my way to Cape Town. I was fortunate to sit next to a guy about my age on the plane who is from Cape Town and gave me a few pointers before I became entirely engrossed in the online entertainment package. I watched approximately 3.5 movies, slept for about 1.5 hours, and before I knew it 12 hours had passed and I was landing in Cape Town!!!

Victor, Jeannie and Trevor (Cape Town Rotarian) picked me up from the airport and we were on our way.

SO - it only took 4 days of travel (a little less, actually), to make it from Burley, Idaho to Cape Town South Africa. :)