Next Step, Passport!

We have our order! Friday we found out we had received our order, unfortunately it was to late in the day to do anything about it.  So our next step is to apply for Jude's passport.  We are supposed to go into town tomorrow morning to do this.  It took the family ahead of us just under 2 weeks to receive theirs...please pray the same (or less!) for us.

Yesterday, we had the opportunity to go see some animals.  We had to drive about 6 hours to Murchison Falls, but it was worth it.  We had to keep reminding Chapel (and ourselves) that we were not in a zoo....that we were seeing wild animals!

 When we arrived we ate lunch at an outdoor restaurant where there were 3 warthogs hanging out. We could have touched them, but were advised they can not be friendly...which then was kinda scary because we were so close! 

We then took a ferry across the Nile River to get to the other side of the park.  Chapel thought this was great, because all the cars drive on it to be taken across. 

We rode on top of the vehicle which was a lot of fun.  Once, when trying to track a lion, they took us off of the dirt road where we hit a large, covered hole.  I flew forward and fell into the opening on the car seats below...with  Jude Daniel in my lap!  Neither of us were hurt and we all got a good laugh because it happened so suddenly.  :)

We looked for animals from 2:00-6:20.  We saw many 'antelope' type things...there were several different kinds, all with different names.  We also saw elephants, baboons and giraffes!  We looked for lions, but never spotted any.  They tried so hard to find us a lion that we ended up pushing our time to make it back to the last ferry, so our ride back was very fast and bumpy...so much that Jude and I opted to sit inside the jeep for fear of being popped off..Andrew and Chapel followed a few mintues later.  Thankfully, the ferry was running a few minutes behind so we made it.

 

We came back and had dinner at the same restaurant. Instead of warthogs, there were now hippos! I don't think I have ever seen a hippo that was not covered in water up to its nose.  They are crazy huge, and we were so close we could have touched it, but were told to stay away. We stayed the night in a very small concrete building. It had 1 small fan that was solar powered, so it quit about midnight, which made it very hot...plus there were only 2 twin beds for all of us to share.  About 10 minutes after we turned out the lights to go to sleep I heard something outside eating. I looked our our "window" (a large hole with a screen and curtain over it) to find a hippo outside our room.  If the screen not been there I could have touched it!  It made me a little nervous, because it could just as easily pop its head right through the screen! I watched it leave around the corner, only to hear it a few minutes later on the other side of our room.  So crazy!

Before heading back to The Lodge we stopped at the falls which were beautiful! We had a great time with our family...definitely a once in a lifetime experience that we will always remember!