Welcome Home

I’m staring out the windows of my hometown Starbucks and am slightly disturbed. The plush purple chairs have been slashed to expose the foam stuffing underneath and I just had to switch to a new circular table because the first one was too wobbly. The nerve! MY Starbucks in Seattle would never stoop to this level of disarray. MY Starbucks is proud and holds it caffeinated head high. Of course, I should be grateful that I can at least find a Starbucks here; most of the Plains states I traveled through still don’t know that a tall and a small are the same thing! Those poor people.

I’m obviously being facetious. Would those really be the comments of someone traveling to Africa in two weeks? (Okay, maybe.)

I’m ready to bust out some road trip rhetoric, with my headphones plugged-in and an iced-tea in reach. Why no coffee? Well, I realized that things may be a little different in Mali and that it would be best to wean myself off this addiction. Can anyone imagine anything worse than arriving in Africa, after 24 hours of traveling, with a massive caffeine headache? No thank you, I declare as I retire my French Press for a few months.

I took brief notes while I was driving these past four days: barely comprehensible scribbles of those thoughts and musings that inevitably fill the void of the empty road. Rather than a long chronologically-boring description, I’m going to try to break it up thematically, maybe in some sort of order, but most likely random. Little vignettes that together provide a good depiction of the entire trip.

Drumroll please…