UGANDA: KIDEPO TO KAMPALA

 July 25, 2025

We planned to end our trip with a day exploring Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. It would take us two days to drive there, and we had already experienced those roads and knew we didn't want to experience them again. Fortunately, Bob had decided when he was planning the trip that we needed a quicker way back and had booked a flight instead.

I took a photo of this map that was hanging in the Kidepo Airport and added the red circles and line to show the locations of take off and touch down.

The Kidepo Airport is two very small, sparsely furnished rooms--an office and a waiting room--not far from the national park and about 300 miles (by air) to Kampala.

They have a nice photo of President Museveni (more about him in my next post) hanging on the wall, and they keep their flight records in a handwritten ledger.

INDIA, DECEMBER 2024: LAX TO GUWAHATI

December 14-16, 2024    

We've been wanting to go to India for a while, but the timing never worked out. A few years ago it was not our year to have everyone home for Christmas, and I made the casual comment to Bob that next time it wasn't our year, I wanted to be traveling instead of sitting around at home. He took that as a green light for India and began planning. Once Bob starts planning, well . . . 

We drove to LAX on Saturday, December 14. We were trying out a new parking structure--105 Airport Parking--and couldn't find it. It turns out it had changed names to South Bay Parking, but no notice had been sent informing us of that change. It turned out to be a bit of a dump, and not a place we would recommend. There was only ONE available parking spot in the whole place, and it was on Level 6, the top floor. Of course, the elevator was broken, so Bob dropped me off and unloaded our luggage before going up (and then taking the stairs down after he parked).  We waited and waited and waited in a decrepit waiting room for a shuttle.  After at least a half hour, we gave up and called an Uber, which cost $18. 

Luckily, we always leave ourselves lots of time when we take international flights out of LAX as we never know what kind of traffic we will be facing on the LA freeways. We had time for a pizza at Wolfgang Puck's before flying to San Francisco Airport, where we again had plenty of time and enjoyed some clam chowder in a sour dough bread bowl. 

The plan was to meet up in India with my sister Chris and her husband Stan, who live in Billings, Montana. While we were in the San Francisco Airport, we got a text from Stan telling us they had missed their first flight from Billings→Seattle, which meant they might be behind 24 hours or more. Later we heard that they found a Billings→Portland→Seattle flight and made it in time to make their Seattle→London flight before their London→Delhi flight. Whew.

When we boarded our Air India flight from San Francisco→Delhi, we were struck by how Indian the plane seemed. Its seats were a yellowish-orange and red, and it smelled like an Indian restaurant. 

ITALY 2024: LOS ANGELES TO ISTANBUL TO NAPLES

Wednesday, March 13-14, 2024

We planned a trip to Italy, Malta, and Tunisia during my spring break in March 2024 and invited my sister Chris and her husband Stan to join us. The trip started off a bit rocky. On Sunday morning, we were notified by Lufthansa that our Wednesday flight from LAX through Munich to Naples had been cancelled due to an airline cabin worker strike planned for that day. They offered us flights on Thursday, which would have ruined our plans for Naples. We booked a new flight for Wednesday with Turkish Air, and Travelocity promised to refund the cost of our initial round-trip tickets.

Chris and Stan, flying in from Montana, did not have the luxury of the flight options we had, and they ended up having to book their flight to Naples a day earlier, arriving on Tuesday instead of Wednesday. What a hassle.

We left for LAX at 8:30 AM, and our phone's navigation took us on the most bizarre route to avoid morning rush hour traffic, including segments through residential neighborhoods. After 2¼ hours of driving, we made it to our prepaid parking at the Hilton. Even after waiting what seemed like an usually long time for the hotel shuttle and then picking up our boarding passes at the Turkish Air desk (we had only carry on luggage), we had time to eat lunch.

Our first leg to Istanbul was over 12 hours long. (I watched 3½ movies--Priscilla, Barbie, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, and half of an Inspector Poirot movie that I finished on the return flight.) It was our first time on Turkish Air, and we loved everything about it EXCEPT for very cramped seating. The food was great--stuffed pasta shells for dinner and scrambled eggs for breakfast. We especially liked the flight attendant outfits.  They did ditch the hats after take-off.

Leaving Los Angeles, and arriving (I think?) in Turkey:

COLOMBIA: BOGOTA TO PEREIRA TO TINAMU, DAY 1

 March 18, 2023

During the night I began stressing about my stolen phone and couldn't sleep. I looked at my email on Bob's phone and saw an email from either Verizon or Apple (I can't remember which) that said that at 4:45 PM someone had tried to retrieve my password to unlock the phone. That made me nervous and didn't help my insomnia. I was also a little nauseous. I think I fell asleep around 2:00 AM and got two hours of sleep before being startled awake at 4:00 by the alarm.

We were picked up at 4:45 AM and transported to the airport. We were supposed to have been given boarding passes, but they hadn't come, so we had to figure out how to do that. We made it to our gate in time to get Savannah a "pink drink" at Starbuck's for breakfast. I had a Coke to settle my stomach, and I bought some chocolate for the first time on the trip. 

Somehow we got seated on Row 2 in business class, which was the best seat on the plane. (Row 1 had less leg room.) It wasn't especially luxurious, but they did put a little table where the middle seat should be. It was a small plane, and they did make us check our bags.

Our flight to Pereira was supposed to be a little over an hour, but as we were coming in for a landing, the plane suddenly jerked upward for a steep climb, and then we made a wide circle (or two) before making a successful landing.  I have no idea what that was about. Pilot in training?

You can see from the map below that Bogotá and Pereira are not that far apart relative to the distance between Cartagena (top left of map) and Bogotá. We could have had someone drive us to Pereira, a distance of about 200 miles, but it takes almost eight hours to make the drive, which indicates what the roads are like. No thanks.

We had never heard of Pereira and don't know anyone else who has, even those it has a population of over 700,000 people. It is located in the Andean foothills and is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site known as the "Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia." The soil in this region is rich in minerals from volcanic eruptions.

We were picked up in the Pereira airport by a very friendly and talkative driver who took us to Tinamú Birding Reserve, abouat 1.5 hours away. We started on a very nice highway that eventually devolved into a narrow, bumpy dirt road with tight turns, and by the time we arrived, I was green. At the very end we cam nose-to-nose with a car coming out. Our driver had to back up quite a way before they could pass each other.

We got to the reserve at about 11:00 AM. We had a fairly large cabin not far from the main lodge. Here is the front entrance:

. . . and the side view:

I loved the tropical murals and bed throws in our room.

ECUADOR: TRAVELING TO THE GALAPAGOS ISLANDS AND VISITING BALTRA AND SANTA CRUZ ISLANDS

 March 21, 2022

After our full day in Quito, we were ready to head to the Galapagos Islands. Our hotel in Quito was one or two blocks from the airport, and the hotel had a shuttle ready for the eight of us at 7:00 AM. There were some confusing things to do at the airport, like have our bags run through x-ray before security as well as fill out some forms in a different location of the airport. It was by no means a clear process.

The Galapagos Islands straddle the equator 563 miles west of continental Ecuador. Flights leave for the islands from Guayaquil, so we had to fly there first (45 minute flight). It was fun to see the Guayaquil LDS Temple both on landing and take-off.

The second leg of the flight, from Guayaquil to the Galapagos Islands, was about 1.5 hours. This map isn't to scale (the islands are MUCH smaller in relation to the continent), but it at least gives a good idea of the location and number of the islands. There are 13 major islands and more than 100 smaller islands in the chain.

Map from here

Two airports are used for tourism in the Galapagos. We landed at the one on the island of Baltra, a tiny desert island separated from the much larger island of Santa Cruz by a narrow channel. (The other airport is on the island of San Cristobal.)

We disembarked old-style down a flight of stairs wheeled up to the plane.

The airport itself is quite small.

After two long years of pandemic waiting, we were very excited to finally be on the Galapagos Islands!

ECUADOR (AND PANAMA): MARCH 2022

 March 16-17, 2022

Background:

Back in 2019, Bob began planning a trip for the members of his law firm and their spouses to the Galapagos Islands in March 2021. Bob booked a yacht that would hold eight couples. Five of the rooms would be taken by the attorneys and spouses, and we found three other couples to join us, including some close friends of ours, so that we could fill all the rooms. Then Covid-19 hit in March 2020, and after it became apparent that travel would not be possible in March 2021, the trip was postponed. 

Over the ensuing year, Bob's partners dropped out one-by-one for various reasons, as did our friends. However, Bob would not be deterred. We cast about among our other friends who enjoy travel and came up with two new couples, and one of those couples had friends who wanted to join us, making four couples total. For several months at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, we bounced back and forth as to whether or not we should commit to the trip, knowing that we stood the risk of losing a substantial downpayment. We had been badly burned in 2020 by our aborted trip to Argentina and another trip to Indonesia that we had fully booked. (Trip insurance, which we had, did not cover any of it.)

THREE SUMMITS: #3, BLACK MESA IN OKLAHOMA, CAPULIN VOLCANO, AND SUGARITE CANYON

 October 18, 2020

We had one more highpoint to summit on this trip: Black Mesa, the highest point in Oklahoma. One of the interesting thing about this highpoint is that Black Mesa actually extends into Colorado and New Mexico, and the highpoint in both of those other states is higher than the highpoint in Oklahoma (but is not the highpoint in those states).

We left our hotel at about 7:00 AM and drove an hour to the trailhead. When we began our hike just after 8:00, it was only 36° F.  I wrote in my notes that I was wearing 2 pairs of pants, a long-sleeved shirt, a Columbia zip jacket, a down jacket, and Bob's gloves. (Thanks, dear.)

The round trip hike was 8.4 miles, and when we got back to the car at 11:30, it was 39°.  It was cold, but we kept up a quick pace and it wasn't too bad--until we got to the mesa itself.

Just before the gate is this granite bench honoring Jean Trousdale, "Highpointers Foundation Director, Founder of the Club Mercantile, Clinical Psychologist, Mother, Grandmother, Friend." The photo of her with her dog is captioned, "Enjoy the view and have a good hike!"  She looks like someone I would have liked to know.

THREE SUMMITS: GETTING THERE AND SUMMIT #1, PANORAMA POINT IN NEBRASKA

 October 16, 2020

Now that we have been to all 50 states, my husband is trying to "fill in the spaces" on the United States map--traveling to places within the states where we have not been. Since we have been to many of the major cities, that means that he is looking for, shall we say, "out-of-the-way" places to visit. He also is keeping a list of state high points that he has climbed (or driven to). That's how he got the idea to travel to a rather obscure area of the U.S.--the western regions of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. He could check three high points off his list and visit a little-known area of the U.S. Perfect.

Looks excitin', doesn't it?

And just to convince you of how exciting this trip was going to be, here is the location of those three high points. Note how close they are to major cities--heck, to any city. They are in Nowheresville.

This is what I was leaving behind. (The mural is in the Ontario Airport.)

We flew from Ontario, California, to Denver, Colorado. The best part of the flight was that we flew directly over the Grand Canyon. If we've done that before, I have not had a window seat on the correct side of the plane. This time, I had a spectacular view.

GREENLAND: ILULISSAT TO KANGERLUSSUAQ

June 17, 2019

The last part of our Greenland adventure was in the tiny, tiny, tiny town of Kangerlussuaq, population 540.

As you can kind of see on the map below, Kangerlussauq is at the end of a very deep fjord. The fjord is named . . . you guessed it, Kangerlussauq Fjord. In fact, the word "Kangerlussuaq" means "big fjord" in Icelandic.

Ilulissat and Kangerlussuaq are only about 150 miles apart, but unless you have a dog sled, pretty much the only way to get to Kangerlussauq is by plane. There is no road that connects it to any other town. (There are no roads connecting ANY towns in Greenland. All roads are internal to the towns themselves.)

Which may account for the fact that Kangerlussuaq, with its 500+ inhabitants, is the site of Greenland's largest commercial airport. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense to me either.  

More about Kangerlussuaq later. First I have to tell the story of how we got there. 

We were transported from our hotel to the airport, which was just a few minutes away. Although we didn't realize it at the time, both Bob and Laura, another member of our group, had left things behind. Laura realized her purse was missing as soon as we got to the airport. She figured out that she had left it in the luggage storage room. She sent our taxi driver back to retrieve it, but he never re-materialized and we think he never actually went back to the hotel. (I can't remember how Laura got on the plane. She must have had some type of ID, or maybe they just trusted her.)

Later, while sitting in a restaurant in Kangerlussuaq, Bob realized that his camera was missing. He called Mamartuk Restaurant first, then the hotel. It turned out that he had set it down on the front desk counter while he paid for something. The hotel promised to send Bob's camera with Laura's the purse.

The plane looks fairly big, but it was a propeller plane with just 36 seats.

GREENLAND: DISKO BAY, DISKO ISLAND, AND ONE MORE FLIGHT OVER THE ILULISSAT GLACIER

June 16, 2019

Have you ever heard of Disko Island? No? Maybe you recognize its Greenlandic name, Qeqertarsuaq ("the big island")?  NO?? At 3,312 square miles, it is barely smaller than Corsica and a little larger than Crete and is the 84th largest island in the world. Eric the Red spent time here in the late 10th century. So why haven't you heard of it?

Well, unlike Corsica and Crete, it's not exactly a tourist destination. Located above the Arctic Circle, the entire island has a population of 1,100, most living in the only town, Qeqertarsuaq. (Yes, the same Icelandic name as the island.) Fewer than 50 people live in the only other settlement, Kangerluk, which can be reached by boat or air but not by road. There is one hotel in Qeqertarsuaq, and supposedly there is also one taxi driver. Since 1906 the University of Copenhagen has had a year-round research facility on the island known as Arctic Station.

Legend says that Disko Island was pulled north by a couple of strong kayakers who used a single strand of a newborn baby's hair for a tow rope. They got stuck in Disko Bay when a witch living in Ilulissat spotted them and put a curse on their efforts.

There may be change ahead for Disko Island. Air Zafari is beginning air tours of Disko Bay and Disko Island (we were one of their first customers on that tour), and locals are exploring the possibilities of amenities such as a ski slope, expanded hiking trips, and a hotel. Ten years from now, Disko Island may be a very different place.

During the evening of the same day that we cruised to Eqi Glacier, Bob and I and our friends Lori and Mark boarded a small plane, flew across Disko Bay, circled around Disko Island, and ended by flying over parts of the polar ice sheet on the mainland that we hadn't seen on our first flight.

Here's our plane. Though I've flown on quite a few now, these little planes still make me nervous:

Up, up, and away--straight over the bay!

GREENLAND, ILULISSAT: FLYING OVER THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET

June 15, 2019

After dinner, so around 9:00 PM, John, Susan, Bob, and I were picked up by two guys from AirZafari for a "flightseeing" tour of the Ilulissat glacier and the Greenland ice sheet. (I'm telling you, no one sleeps in Greenland during the summer!)

I just learned the difference between an ice cap and an ice sheet from greenfacts.org:
"An ice cap is a dome-shaped mass of glacier ice that spreads out in all directions; usually larger than an ice field but less than 50,000 km². An ice sheet is a dome-shaped mass of glacier ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than 50,000 km², such as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets."

The Greenland ice sheet is 1,710,000 km² (or 660,200 m² - three times the size of Texas) and is the second largest ice body in the world, right behind the Antarctic ice sheet.

Nice to know.

We boarded a six-seater plane, the two pilots in front, Bob and John in the middle . . .

and Susan and I in back:

About 80% of Greenland is covered by ice and snow, and the remaining 20% seems to be mostly rocks:

It's beautiful, but it doesn't look particularly habitable:

. . . unless you are a bird:

FROM ICELAND TO GREENLAND

June 14, 2019

Our next stop on our Grand Northern Adventure was Greenland, conveniently marked in green (of course) below:

At about 840,000 square miles, Greenland is the largest island in the world, almost three times as large as the next largest island, New Guinea. (Of course, Australia is more than three times as large as Greenland, but it is considered a continent, not an island.)

Iceland is a mere 40,000 square miles, so Greenland is twenty-one times larger. But while Greenland has a population of about 56,000 people, Iceland has about 340,000 people, or six times as many.

By comparison, the contiguous 48 states in the US comprise about 3.1 million square miles, which is 3.7 times larger than Greenland. Alaska, perhaps a better comparison, is just over 663,000 square miles, about four-fifths the size of Greenland. In contrast, the population of Alaska is about 737,000 people, about 13 times the population of Greenland, and the population of the 48 contiguous states is about 327 million, almost 6,000 times the population of Greenland.

That's not surprising considering that most of Greenland is inside the Arctic Circle, which doesn't make for great farming or raising of livestock (although it is great for fishing), and which means the summers are very short and the winters are very, very long.

Map from Wikipedia

There are only two cities that offer flights in and out of Greenland: Reykjavik (Iceland) and Copenhagen (Denmark). All other flights to Greenland connect in these two cities. Greenland doesn't get a lot of tourists. I think this chart from Wikipedia showing the number of overnight visitors in 2016 is very interesting.

If you are wondering why so many more visitors come from Denmark than the other Scandinavian countries, it is because Greenland is an autonomous Danish territory, so there are many economic and cultural ties between the two countries. I would think Iceland and Canada, Greenland's closest neighbors, would be sending more tourists, but apparently Greenland doesn't have much appeal for them.

As a side note, this week the news media reported that President Trump is talking about buying Greenland. Having been to Greenland and having seen the national pride of the people and the lifestyle they have chosen, it seems like a preposterous and even offensive idea to me.  I love this tongue-in-cheek response published in the New Yorker a few days ago: "Denmark Offers to Buy U.S."

ICELAND AND GREENLAND, AN OVERVIEW AND A JOURNEY

Every five years my husband, his four law partners, and their spouses take a trip together.  This all started in 2009 when they were celebrating 15 years as a law firm. That year we went to Peru. We had so much fun that we decided to do it again. In 2014, we all traveled to Kenya and Tanzania. That was also a great trip, so we decided to do it one last time.

The five men had a hard time coming up with a destination for their 25th anniversary this year. Most of the couples travel quite a bit, so finding a place no one had been was the first challenge, finding somewhere that everyone wanted to visit was another, and finding a date that would work for everyone was yet another.

The stars all aligned for a trip to Iceland and Greenland, June 9 to 19. I must confess, this wasn't my first choice of a destination. Neither country had ever really been on my bucket list, but Bob was pretty excited about it.

It turned out out to be a really fun trip, partly because I love the people we traveled with, and partly because--okay, I'll admit it--I grew to love the destinations.

Although it seems like the two countries would be very much alike, they definitely are not.

CRITERIA	ICELAND	GREENLAND
SIZE	39,682 square miles (About the size of Kentucky)	836,300 square miles (21 times bigger than Iceland)
POPULATION IN 2019	358,000+	56,672
POPULATION DENSITY	3 people per square kilometer, or 8 people per square mile, making it the least densely populated European country (Compare to Alaska, with 1.3 per square mile, or Wyoming, with 6 per square mile)	.026 people per square kilometer, making it the least densely populated country in the world
LARGEST CITY	Reykjavik (Capital): 128,793	Nuuk (Capital): 17,984
LANGUAGE	Icelandic (North Germanic language descended from Old Norse)	Greenlandic (Eskimo-Aleut language) and Danish (Most citizens are bilingual.)
GOVERNMENT	Semi-colony of Denmark until they achieved Independence in 1918.	Became Danish in 1814 and was fully integrated into Denmark in 1953. Denmark granted Greenland home rule in 1979.
CURRENCY	Icelandic Krona	Danish Krone
GDP	$54,753 per capita	$37,000 per capita
RELIGION	Lutheran	Lutheran
TOURISM	2.2 million tourists in 2017	32,767 tourists in 2016 (and fewer than 3,000 were from the US)
UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITES	2	3

In addition, both countries are pretty far north (requiring winter clothing, even in June, and having 24 hours of continuous daylight while we were there), but most of Greenland is inside the Arctic Circle.

SRI LANKA: GALLE AND THE JOURNEY HOME

We had time for one last meal and a visit to one more city before heading to the airport. Lunch was at an open-air restaurant on the beach where the view almost made up for the mediocre food:

We opted for the seafood platter. It had very good calimari, yucky overcooked tuna, dry shrimp, and okay spiny lobster split down the middle:

We drove from the restaurant to Galle, a large city on the southernmost tip of Sri Lanka. As an important port city, it was basically taken over by Portuguese colonizers in the 16th century and is supposedly the best example of a Portuguese fortified city in all of Asia. When the Dutch came in during the 17th century, they added their own touch, making the city an interesting hodge podge of architectural styles.

Our first stop was the fortress. The clock tower was built in 1882 on the spot where the Dutch belfry once stood: