We left home for Tampa International Airport at 9am on Thursday, November 9th. After 28 hours and three flights, we arrived in Cape Town<\/a>, South Africa. The easiest part was the drive to Tampa and the flight to Atlanta. The fight to Johannesburg, SA was delayed by an hour because of a variety of issues. That flight, of 15 hours, is one of the longest non-stop flights in the world. The delay reduced our time for the flight to Cape Town to less than an hour. When we checked in for the flights, we were told that luggage was going to be transferred through to Cape Town. And then the fun began\u2026
In Johannesburg, we were told that we had to go through immigration and customs. That would have made us arrive at the gate as the boarding procedure for our Cape Town flight was closing. While I was waiting for our luggage, Susie was talking to a pair of women who were at the luggage carousel with wheelchairs and arranged for them to take us through to immigration. Once through immigration, we found another two women with wheelchairs to take us to the gate. Neither one of us could walk fast enough to make the journey from the baggage claim area to the gate. The gate agent notified the gate personnel that we were coming but could not guarantee that our luggage would make it. In Cape Town we approached the baggage carousel with minimum expectations that our bags were going be arriving\u2026 they were among the first to arrive. We were supposed to be met by a driver to take us to the Southern Sun-The Cullinan Hotel<\/a>. He was late in arriving, but called Susie to let her know that he was coming. Exhausted from the travel, we only took a few things out of our luggage and went to sleep.
Today, Saturday November 11, is going to be quiet. We got up later than usual and had our breakfast. While the room was being cleaned, we walked around the area of the hotel a bit and headed back to the room. Not planning to do anything other than recuperate from our flight.
The tour officially starts in Cape Town. Rather than give you a lot of additional text, I took the detailed itinerary provided Globus and inserted an edited version of it below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n