We’re in Africa! We’ve been looking forward to this trip for nine years, and we’re finally here.
Kirundi word of the day: Amahoro (hello)
Fun fact: It takes 30 hours to get from Glendale, Arizona to Bujumbura, Burundi.
Actually, it should take longer than that if you schedule long enough layovers– I don’t recommend sprinting across Chicago O’Hare Airport toting six carryon bags and an angry preschooler to catch a connecting flight.
Little Man was happy for most of the trip 🙂
If you’ve been following for a while, you might remember a previous post announcing that we’d be in Kenya for six weeks last spring. Well, that didn’t work out. But the Africa vacation to Burundi and Tanzania that we’re taking now is turning out to be much better than trip to work in the hospital would have been!
Ben was born in Burundi and lived here until he was four, when his family was displaced to Tanzania during the war. In fact, he lived in the house where I’m writing this– his father built it on the family’s mission station 30 years ago and now his oldest brother lives here. But being born in Burundi gives Ben more than just a passport that makes border agents do a double-take. It’s also given him a lifelong connection to a place that will always feel like home.
It took three hours to get through the Bujumbura airport
After our long trip to Bujumbura, Burundi, we finally managed to extricate ourselves from the airport to find the people who would pick us up. To my joy, I saw eight family members waiting for us in the parking lot, where they had spent hours so they could be sure to greet us! We haven’t seen some of the nephews in six years, so our drive to their home a few miles away was a happy reunion.
Bujumbura, Burundi
Keep following to hear about the rest of our Africa adventures! We’ll be here for a whole month traveling between several locations.
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When you get an invitation to go up in a prop plane, you take it.
I recently finished writing a novel manuscript that involves a character making an emergency landing in a small plane. And that’s all I’m going to tell you about it for now—sign up for my newsletter in the sidebar if you want to hear more in the future!
Thanks to the flight elements in my novel, I watched a lot of Youtube and read a lot of content on how to fly a plane.
Turns out, all those buttons and the names of various parts of airplanes are kind of hard to get a handle on when you’re just piddling around online.
So, I wrote the scenes as well as I could and then reached out to John Correia, one of my professors from college who also happens to have his pilot’s license, to see if he’d look it over and make sure I had it right.
Sure, he said. I could do that. Or, I could take you flying.
Um, yes please.
To say I was excited would be a major understatement. I’ve been on a lot of commercial jets, but never in a small aircraft.
The weather was perfect on the day of the flight. I pulled into the parking lot of Flying Cacti at the Glendale Airport and looked around. Not only had I never been on a smaller plane, I’ve never been in a hangar. Actually, I think I might have been in one at Luke’s Airforce Base when I was a kid on a field trip. Obviously I don’t remember enough of that for it to count, though.
Before Takeoff
John opened the hangar door to reveal a blue and white Van’s RV12. Wow! I couldn’t help but run my fingers over the glossy exterior. I could already tell that the glass dome covering the cabin was going to give incredible views, and propeller on the nose just begged to take us for a spin.
John whipped out a checklist to show me all the things he had to check before taking the plane up. It was a long list. As he pointed out, if something goes wrong with your car, you pull over. If something goes wrong with the plane, you fall out of the sky. I had been a little bit nervous at the idea of being way up in the air in a small aircraft, but after seeing how thoroughly everything had to be checked, the trace of nerves I had vanished.
During this process, it was cool to get to ask questions about how the plane worked and what every little thing did. For example, the static ports, two tiny pinholes in what looked to me like screws, use air pressure to give the pilot information about speed and altitude. I never cease to be amazed by engineers and their ability to create and pay attention to all the details. Or to create a flying machine that can carry two people and only weighs about 800 pounds.
Once all the checks were done, John pulled the plane out of the hangar and we climbed in. For my book, I needed to know the steps to start the plane and taxi down the runway, so he talked through everything as he went. When the propeller started whirring into a blur, I could feel it pushing air right into the cabin through the vents that serve as air conditioning.
My heart started beating a little faster. I was in real prop plane, about to go up in the air!
Flying!
John taxied down the runway. We waited for a couple of other planes to take off, and then he powered the plane forward, lifted the nose, and suddenly we were up in the air. Just like that. I felt a huge smile stretching across my face. Wow, the views were way better than they are in a jet with the giant wing slicing through my view out the tiny window. I could see the whole dome of sky above and the earth rapidly falling away below.
We flew above Phoenix Raceway, over the top of the Estrella Mountains, and into farm country I didn’t even know existed behind the mountain range. Below us, brown pinpricks wandered around—cows grazing in the sunshine. The Gila River snaked through the region, feeding the various canals that turn the landscape green despite the desert beige that stretches in all directions beyond the Phoenix area.
In the Air
Since the episode in my story involves a non-towered airport, John took me to Buckeye Airport for a touch-and-go landing, meaning the plane landed on the runway and took off again without stopping. I got to hear all the pilots talking to each other through my headset, communicating in the absence of a tower to coordinate landings and takeoffs.
It’s kind of hard to understand all the different voices through the headsets, which is why pilots use the NATO phonetic alphabet to reduce avoid confusion when they communicate. It sounds like some sort of secret code. Charlie Oscar Oscar Lima!
I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask about the way prop planes work, what would happen if the pilot stopped flying for a couple minutes, how to read the dials on the control panel (although this plane had a screen instead). And I did eventually manage to find the answers to all these things. For a while, though, the scenery and experience was so overwhelming that all I could do was look out the window and take it all in.
Eventually, it was time to head back to Glendale Airport. I searched the landscape for the freeway and the Cardinals stadium to get a sense of location. Wow, we had gone a long way, even though it didn’t feel like it! Back over the Estrellas we went, and soon the landing strip came closer and closer.
Landing the Prop Plane
“Every landing is a crash,” John told me. “The question is, how well are you going to control it? A good landing is one where you can walk away from the plane. A great landing is one where you can fly the plane again.”
Every time I fly, I dread the sensation of touching down. Turbulence doesn’t bother me in the least. Landing? Ugh. Usually, I grip the seat, hold my breath, and tense up in preparation for the jolt of hitting the ground. But I didn’t want to look like a moron while sitting next to a pilot, so I did my best to brace myself invisibly.
The familiar sensation of dropping in a 1000-foot elevator twisted my insides, and then the wheels touched the landing strip . . . and it was fine. I guess there’s a big difference between the feeling of landing in a 400,000-pound jetliner and the feeling of landing in a two-person plane that weighs less than half a ton!
Back at Flying Cacti
John taxied the plane back to the hangar. We rolled past a party in one of the other hangars (the party being nine seniors in lawn chairs) and got a glance at someone’s fancy two-seater, and then we were pulling off the headsets and climbing out of the plane. The owner of Flying Cacti came by for a chat, and one of the employees stopped his truck for a minute to say hi, giving me a sense of the community there.
What an experience! I had always thought of flying a plane as some kind of scary and mysterious process. I figured I had a better shot at getting sprinkled with Neverland fairy dust than grasping the concept of how airplanes move in the air. Although I never took physics (marine biology is way more fun, guys), the basic concept sounds pretty crazy. You’re fighting one of nature’s most basic forces, gravity, by harnessing different forces: thrust and lift.
What I realized from my time in the air is that, yeah, being a pilot takes a lot of skill, from understanding the NATO phonetic alphabet to keeping tabs on all the processes happening inside and outside the plane. But there’s also a sense of wonder to being in the air, controlling a flying machine, seeing the world from a whole new angle. There’s a lot of science involved, but really, science is just another word for magic.
There comes a time when you have to get out of the heat. And just in case you were wondering, it is HOT here in the Valley of the Sun. Like, your air conditioner is going to die hot. Fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk hot. I’ve seen both those things done in Phoenix this past week!
Obviously, we were extremely happy to escape the 117 degree heat and get somewhere cooler. My dad planned a weekend getaway to Lake Tahoe over Father’s Day, and he he invited Ben and I, my sister, and her friend to come!
The trip started out with the usual mad rush to the airport. Did you know that Phoenix Sky Harbor offers a bag check in the parking lot? We were eager to use this and skip the lines. However, we still had to wait behind a few people, and by the time we got to the kiosk, we were 30 seconds too late and the computer had shut down early bag checks for our flight. So up the escalator and to the bag check we went, dragging our suitcases and heavy backpacks behind us.
These are the times when we definitely wish we could get a parking spot at the airport without all the hassle. Sky Harbor actually has a pretty good parking system, and it’s still a pain.
There’s actually a parking lot service out there. It’s called ParkitUSA and it’s kind of like Expedia or Priceline, but for airport parking spaces instead of flights! You can see all your options online and then pick the best price. If you go online to ParkitUSA.com and book your parking with them, you can save time and money with daily parking starting around $2. They do it all–long term, short term, onsite, offsite, and discounted airport parking reservations. I haven’t actually used this service yet, but I can tell you it would make life a whole lot easier during that stressful pre-flight scramble.
Anyway, we did manage to survive the airport fiasco and still have time to grab a Starbucks in the process! We made it on our flight and were soon winging it over the dry expanse of mountainous Nevada desert.
I can’t even describe how wonderful it was to get to Reno and feel the cool air! Of course, once we drove through Carson City to Tahoe South, it was even better.
We could see snow on the mountains. How long has it been since I’ve seen snow? Probably a good three or four years.
Fortunately for us desert rats, there was no snow on the ground. I’m not sure we could have handled the chill.
In case you’re looking for an escape from the heat this summer, Tahoe is a pretty great choice. Sometimes you just need to get out of town for a while and enjoy some time in the mountains! I’m counting the days until my next mountain adventure.
Wondering what it’s like to travel overseas with a dog? Turns out, harder than you’d expect but more than worth it! Here’s my friend Jon, the husband of a med school student at American University of the Caribbean and proud owner of a boarder collie, on how to bring a dog overseas and help him adjust. To read more of Jon’s pet advice, head over to The Healthy Pup.Â
Once we realized that we would be moving to St. Maarten for two years, there was no question that Forte, our Border Collie, was coming with us! As we prepared for our move, we realized we didn’t like the idea of Forte stuck in a cage in the cargo hold, so we decided to make him an emotional support dog so that he could sit with us on our flight. We had our vet fill out the paperwork necessary for Forte to travel to St Maarten.
We knew that Forte’s high energy would be hard to manage throughout two flights and a layover, so the vet gave us a tranquilizer that we had Forte take after we got to the airport, which made him drowsy but able to walk along with us. We had quite a day – we woke up at 2 in the morning, flew from Chicago to Atlanta, and then from Atlanta to St Maarten. We landed in St. Maarten at about 3 in the afternoon, and Forte was great the whole time. He mostly slept on the flights (and lay on my wife’s lap a lot), and he waited patiently during the short layover we had. He’s weird about going to the bathroom in new places, so we didn’t have to worry about any accidents (but we did bring a few pads just in case).
Forte had no problem adjusting to his new home! We brought the blanket he always had in his cage as well as several of his favorite toys. Forte loves to play, so the minute we started throwing his ball around the apartment, he relaxed. We had to buy a new cage and retrain him to like his cage, and that was a process, but he likes his cage now, too! We also packed a few pounds of the kibble he was eating back home.
When we got to the island, we bought food and slowly increased the proportion of new food in his meals, which allowed him to transition to the food we will continue to buy on the island without getting an upset tummy. The dog park near the school is a great place to take Forte and throw the Frisbee for him, which is his favorite (my wife and I like it too, because it tires him out so much)!
We wondered if Forte would become depressed or homesick, but so far he has been his playful, affectionate self! We have done everything we can to make him feel at home, and it looks like we have been successful.
Things that go fast never lose their appeal for us. Sure, we may outgrow the toy trucks and die-cast tractors, but real planes? Forever awesome. Every year (starting in 2015), Sint Maarten holds an air show above Great Bay. This year, I took R to the Boardwalk to enjoy the show!
Of course, that was way back in November, but who cares? Better late than never. I couldn’t resist sharing the photos.
The first thing we did was explore the festival on the Boardwalk. Unfortunately, most of the activities were either for adults or younger kids, so R found it kind of boring until the show started. Still, there were some pretty sweet motorcycles because of the biker event that was also happening on the island, and he thought those were cool. So did I, if only for the sheer number of them, even though I seriously could not care less about motorcycles.
The air show started (after much waiting under some palm trees) with parachuters jumping from the planes. They landed not too far from us on the beach, one at a time.
Soon, the planes began to show their stuff. They seemed to fly dangerously close to each other! I think that might have been an illusion of distance and depth, but it’s hard to tell.
The planes did corkscrews in the air, falling through the air at heart-stopping speeds before leveling out above the bay and flying upward once again.
You know, I never thought I was much of an airplane person, but I’m learning how awesome they are! Between Princess Juliana Airport down the street and the airshow in Philipsburg, I just may be addicted to flight.
Yo hablo un poco Español. Imagine me saying that in a very bad Mexican/American accent, and you will hear the best of my Spanish. Actually, I’m not sure if the grammar is even correct (perhaps someone can enlighten me in the comments). Sometimes I try “Yo hablo poquito Español,” but either way I am met with chuckles and amused smiles. Not sure if it’s the white girl accent or if I’m just saying everything wrong.
You’d think that I would have learned Spanish just by living near the Arizona-Mexico border, working with Spanish-speaking people, and going to Mexico a dozen times. Nope. Living in Phoenix taught me enough Spanish to pronounce “gila,” “agua,” and “cholla” correctly and navigate my way through Food City.  Unfortunately, the people I asked to help me learn mostly liked to teach me insults and laugh when I asked someone to “give me the hooker” when I wanted lettuce. Thanks, guys.  Muchas Gracias.
Me in 2007 with my dad and friends in Mexico, not knowing Spanish
Fortunately, my Spanish has been steadily improving since I moved to the island. On the plane ride here, I set next to a Puerto Rican lady for a few hours. I used all the power of my jet-lagged brain to recall the words I learned in Spanish 101. Her English was even worse than my Spanish, and we got along just fine. Through Spanglish plus hand gestures, we had a conversation about how to avoid pickpockets in San Juan. I understood enough to be glad I was catching a connection to Sint Maarten!
San Juan
Since I’ve been here, I’ve been practicing on the Duo Lingo app and watching lots of Spanish movies. There are a few Spanish-speaking kids in the group I tutor, so while I teach them English, they teach me Spanish. They learn a lot faster than I do. Some of them learned conversational English in a month, and I’m just over here struggling with Spanish adverbs. I told them they must just be smarter than me. They laugh. And then they correct my Mexican accent.
Teaching as a Learner
There comes a moment in language learning when you realize that you’ve made a major breakthrough. Those moments are some of the best moments of life. It’s kind of like the moment you find out you’re hired or that you won the scholarship. That moment came for me a few days before Christmas when Ben turned the radio to a Christian Spanish station. We were tired, and we just listen to it in silence as we drove. Suddenly it hit me: I could totally understand everything the speaker was saying. I almost jumped right out of my seat, I was so excited. I could understand!
Don’t ever, ever, ever give up on the things that you want to do. Even if they don’t come easily to you.
I’m still struggling with adverbs, and I still don’t know whether I should pronounce “ll” the Mexican way or the Caribbean way. I still can’t speak or hear it as well as I read it. But I’m making progress, and it’s encouraging. Trilingualism, here I come!
