This message was originally written on February 4, 2024

On Tuesday, Liza and I are heading to her homeland of South Africa. This will be the first time that she is returning home since immigrating to Canada exactly 2 years ago. She is really excited to be going home to her friends and family but also admits that she is nervous. She knows that she has changed so much in the last two years and so too have her loved ones. 

As you may know Liza works for G Adventures and one of the perks is that she gets a subsidy towards a tour each year so that she can familiarize herself with the tours to better help clients. Our first thought was that we would either do Morocco or East Africa (as Liza  has not been to either). When we looked into flights however, we quickly learned that there are not easy flights from either area down to Cape Town. We would have to fly back up to Europe with lengthy layovers and higher price tags than if we would just simply fly into SA. Because of this, we decided to spend a week doing a tour through Kruger National Park where we would be able to do several safaris before flying down to Cape Town. You can’t go wrong with an African safari right?!!!

We will be doing the Explore Kruger National Park tour which is an upgraded tour by National Geographic. When I usually travel with G Adventures I have always done the Classic style (or when I was a baby, the 18-30 something style) as those are much more affordable, but since this one is only a week and we got a deal, we will be glamming it up bougie style.

After our 7 day tour we will be flying from Johannesburg to Cape Town and from there it will be a Family/Friend Bonanza Marathon. Liza has literally had to schedule all the friends and family down to the day. There are so many people that we need to see and honestly not enough time for them all. It has been an ongoing challenge leading up to this trip to figure out how we will transport all the gifts. We have so much maple syrup and maple syrup derivatives that we could open up a souvenir shop!! The thing about maple syrup is that it is heavy, liquidy and most often in glass containers…makes me wish that Canada was well known for something other than maple syrup, like spices!! Other items that we are ‘muling’ over are Bath & Body Works lotions and potions, bottles of perfume, Precious Moments figurines (haha, I know), toys – one of which is a massive John Deer dump truck in a box and another is a Barbie and so much more… We have an entire hard top suitcase full of just gifts but they don’t all fit so Liza and I will also be adding them to our luggage. The one thing we are both worried about is that we are not supposed to have much luggage on our week long safari, and most definitely not supposed to bring a big hardtop suitcase. We don’t really have any other alternative so we are just going to bring it and then cross our fingers that nobody hates us.

This being said, we are both really excited about our upcoming trip and I look forward to sharing it with all of you along the way!