July 18

ERIN
Well, this could very well be my last chance to blog. I admit, I get a little tearful just thinking about that. But seriously, we are coming down the home stretch. Only three days now until Roger and Jolene and Lisa and Renae fly home, and Travis and Nicole and I make our journey back to Gaborone. Since we haven’t paid much attention to dates or days of the week, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that we’re nearing the end already. I, for one, am not ready for this to be over. But enough thinking about that.

Today we did not drive anywhere. That in itself is a rather momentous occasion. Since we decided to stay in Swakopmund a second night, we didn’t have to pack anything up this morning. We spent a leisurely morning making some tasty pancakes in the hostel kitchen, and then we piled into Tau for a duneboarding excursion. OK, so we did drive some places…but by now, anything less than five hours in the car is nothing to this crew of hardened travelers.

We stopped on our way to the dunes to buy five duneboards—flat rectangles of wood that you use to slide down the sand dunes. While Roger and Jolene went off on an unsuccessful quest for internet access, the rest of us spent a few hours climbing the dunes and zooming down on our trusty dune boards. The procedure goes something like this: rub wax into the smooth side of the board, lug it up to the top of the dune, lie down on it on your stomach, pull the front edge up with your hands, and take off down the slope. (You must remember, of course, to keep your mouth closed, or suffer the consequence. Eyes, naturally, are a little trickier, as keeping them closed means you’re likely to hit an unexpected footprint and take a faceplant into the sand.) All in all, maybe one percent of our time was spent duneboarding, and the other 99% trudging up the never-ending mountains of sand and painstakingly scraping the ever-present grains out of parts of our bodies that we didn’t even know existed. It was so worth it. In fact, we liked it so much that we went back in the evening for more of the fun and brought the parents along with us. Highlights included watching Roger take his first run down the hill, stacking Travis, Nic, Lisa, and me on top of each other on three boards for a wild ride, and trying to stand up on our boards and sandboard down. We got some sweet video footage of us flying down the slopes and taking some crazy falls. Fortunately, only minor injuries were incurred when we ran high-speed into some unexpected little (and not-so-little) rocks at the bottom of one dune. Even Lisa, who’s still feeling a little under the weather, wouldn’t hear of missing out on the fun and succeeded in being the only one to stand up on her board the entire way down the hill without falling. We watched the sun set over the ocean from the top of a dune, boarded down one last time, and headed back to the hostel, exhausted, for showers, band-aids, real beds, and some hard-earned sleep. Another beautiful day in Africa.
Erin