Rob's flight to Namibia

This is a picture that he took from the air, up there, somewhere ...

In his own words (forwarded to me so I could post them):

Early Tuesday morning.
I'm writing on the plane. We're
expecting to be taking off in any moment.

I'm actually going to
Africa. I realize I've been having to remind myself of this out loud
regularly for the last few weeks. After three years of preparation and
a full year of training, I'm on the verge of actually "doing my job."
I'm actually en route.

I'm excited, very excited, most of the time.
But every once in a while, like right now, I become anxious. It's not
unlike a situation I experienced at the public pool as a child. You see
the other kids on the high dive and think, "That looks fun." And it's
not really that far down. You get in line feeling excitement.
The anxiety comes only at the top of the ladder. It seems a lot farther
down when you're actually on the edge of the diving board. You can't
exactly turn back, nor can you make yourself bounce-bounce-JUMP off the
edge of the board.

Mid-Day (I think)
Having
crossed so
many time zones at this point, I'm no longer sure what time it's
supposed to be. One of my prayer requests for this trip was that it
would be "uneventful." I'm always worried that something will go wrong:
that there will be a delay in a flight that causes a missed connection,
that bags will get lost, that something important will be forgotten.
None of that has happened on this trip. Everything has gone very
smoothly in the senses where I'm always afraid something will go wrong.
And I've received unexpected bonuses: there's very few people on this
flight, so everyone has a whole row! But perhaps things are too
uneventful. Two things have gone "wrong." Each very minor,
but taken together they have caused my trip to be so uneventful as to
be maddeningly boring. The flight from Washington DC to Johannesburg is
about 12 hours in the air, with a one hour refuelling stop. Long
flight, but every seat has video-on-demand. Even economy! And you have
computer games and movies and everything. A few of the movies, enough
to fill at least 8 of the flight hours, were once I actually wanted to
see. However, all of the screens in my row didn't work. And, because
everyone had taken a row by this point, there was no place I could
relocate to. So, I determined that I'd have to just read my book. I got
all high-tech this trip and, instead of bringing paper-books, I checked
out a bunch of e-books from the library to read on my computer. When I
was about 100 pages in to Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My
Country? the computer locked up (serves me right for reading Moore,
some of you are saying) and refused to restart. I've sometimes had
trouble getting my computer to restart after a crash on a battery, so
this isn't the end of the world (as far as my computer goes), but it
does mean I don't have any way to entertain myself.