Still alive, and we have a ton of pictures to prove it...

Hello! It's been a long time, and so instead of writing a novel (which I know you all love so much anyway) I figured I would post all the pictures from the past month. A quick review: we went to Africa for two weeks to visit Jer's parents for Christmas, Jer went to visit her sister in Oregon for a week after we got back, and we had our 2 year anniversary. Hope you all enjoy the pictures!

My cute wife taking a self-portrait. I just wanted to throw that in. :)

The flowers I bought for Jer for our anniversary. She bought me a great picture with a nice frame we just put together.

Now for our trip, this was us sitting in JFK airport waiting for our next flight to Africa.

Now we're in Africa, driving to the house with Jer's parents after they picked us up at the airport. Check out all the shops on the side of the road.

Need some shoes?

Okay, after spending a day or two in Dar we flew off to Arusha to start our safari. Here is Jer and Ireta by our safari truck, which picked us up from the airport in Arusha. James is in the background, he was our guide for 4 days.

We saw a bunch of animals on our safari, and this was the first. Just as we pulled out from the airport in Arusha there was a giraffe.

We had a pit stop at this shop, which was loaded with wood carvings and paintings.

We also stopped at this Maasai market so James could buy himself some goat meat for dinner. Meanwhile, we were getting pestered by the locals trying to sell us stuff.

Our first stop on our safari was this lodge. Here we are walking to our rooms.

Jer hanging out at the lodge, down below is where we would be going the next morning.

Us at dinner, me with my tasty Coke and Jer with her tasty Fanta Passion Fruit.

Now we're out on the safari around Lake Manyara. Right off we were driving through a herd of elephants.

And then a pack of baboons...

Once we finished driving around the lake and had a sack lunch, we drove to our next destination. After an hour or two driving we made it to the Ngorongoro Crater. It was crazy green everywhere which surprised us, and we saw a bunch of wildlife as we were driving up to the rim of the crater. This is a water buck.


This is the entrance to our lodge on the rim of the crater, we stayed there for 2 nights.

Here is the view from our balcony, looking down into the crater. Well, off to the right a bit because we found there were a few elephants grazing just by the tree.

We left to go into the crater early in the morning, here are Jer's parents standing in the safari truck and looking for animals.

A pack of lionesses crossing the road after they have been hunting.

Looking down at Jer, I was still standing and looking around.

Here's a hyena on the side of the road, weird looking things.

Black-backed jackal lying in the shade.

We saw tons of zebras, wildebeests, gazelles... The zebras were cool, we never knew that the young ones start off brown and as they grow up their stripes get black.

I like this shot, this was taken at one of the rest stops in the crater.

A lioness in the shade.

This is as close as I dared to get to a lion, which you can see lying in the shade of another safari truck just in front of us.

Same lion with its kill, before it came over to the shade of the vehicles.

Close shot of the lion.

My favorite part of the safari, we got to see a cheetah!

Ireta talking to Jacob, our local wood carver, at his shop.

This is how women carry their kids around, the kids just sit there.

Here is a spot we went to for lunch one day, Ireta is trying to push her way up in line to order our food.



This is our friend Frank, we went to him to buy all our paintings.

Vegetable market.

Jer with her hair blowing in the wind. We went to the rich area for dinner one night and ate out by the ocean.

On the way home from Africa we had an 8 hour layover in Dubai, by far the nicest airport either of us has been in.

Me passed out in the San Francisco airport, the little sleep I was able to get as we traveled. Jer slept on the benches above me, but apparently not the entire time I was asleep since she decided to take this picture.