Semliki

So really you should probably start looking at these pictures from the bottom up...I always forget that I need to load them in the opposite order I want them to appear...but in any case, these are pictures from our team's retreat at Semliki Safari Lodge...a once in a lifetime opportunity to stay at a luxury safari lodge for a *fraction* of the cost for 5 days/4 nights...it was amazing. We did an evening game drive one night, and here's one of the many warthogs we saw...I love these little guys...
And here's a colobus in a tree just outside the front of our tent...we would get tea/coffee delivered to our tent's front porch each morning and wake up and sip away while watching the monkeys play in the trees....so fun.
Here's a couple buffalo from the game drive...they call these guys "rejects" or something like that because they are too old to run with the young guys, so they are rejected from the pack and run on their own as a group...
Mama warthog and her nursing babies...so cute
team girls having fun (Sarah, Julia, Bethany Ferguson, and Naomi)
Quinn eagerly looking for elephants and leopards...we were dreaming big...Usually it's the singles on safari together, so it was fun to hang with the Pierces on this game drive, and none of us had to drive for a change...
Semliki National Park at dusk...there's a beauty about a dry savannah that I never knew before this trip...

Cob in the grasses
The inside of the tent I shared with the lovely Ashley Wood...we groaned together from our respective beds (with real mattresses, not just foam ones!) in the mornings when the coffee and tea arrived, chatted in the dark about life and whether or not that was a lion or an elephant we just heard outside the tent...we prayed and laughed and just had an all around good time
my bed.
from inside the tent
the porch...it was from here one evening that we each caught glimpses of an elephants trunk...we never saw the rest of it but heard it trampling around in the woods and trees and bushes JUST in front of our tent...it was soooooo cool. I had been talking to my brother on the phone just before, and we lost connection (surprise surprise) so he called me back and I whispered in a whisper loud enough to be heard over international phone wires..."jeff, I've gotta call you back, we're watching for elephants!"...you just have to laugh about it, when else in life are you going to say such a thing?!?!...