Ennen Family Trip Zambia – River Cruise 19Dec17 – NNs On the Wind

December 19, 2017January 7, 2019 Kathleen Ennen

Zambia
19 Dec 2017

The 2017 Ennen family trip with Candy and Shea Ennen, son Henry, daughter Charlotte, taking leave from her post with Peace Corps, and Kathleen and Thom Ennen, depart for S Africa on 9Dec 2017.

After visiting parts of South Africa, the family flies to Zambia on 18Dec2017. Travels entail flying from Cape Town to Zimbabwe where entry visas were obtained at the airport. Then by car and driver to the border crossing into Zambia, where another visa was obtained. Various instructions were suggested by the driver as we’d be taking a day trip back to Zimbabwe to see the Chobe Park.

We stayed at a wonderful Airbnb, Gloria’s, with a pool and terrific breakfast provided. We walked into town for a few supplies and enjoyed the activities planned by Charlotte.

Our first full day entailed a river cruise on the Zambezi River while others went on a canoe trip up the river. We were well upstream of Victoria Falls and enjoyed viewing animals, a bit of rain and lunch on our little boat.

We have traveled over the years and retired in 2017, when we started on a nine month long adventure departing in December 2017. In the past we’ve traveled to Sri Lanka, Africa (several times), Turkey, and made a number of trips to Europe, and St Lucia. Our 2015 trip to Turkey, took nearly 3 weeks to explore Istanbul, Cappadocia and the areas in proximity to Izmir.

This is a chronicle of our travels, past and present. We love to travel by trains, planes, ships, and cars – and love sailing whenever and wherever we can.

We retired from the US General Services Administration, the Federal Government’s landlord! Thom worked at planning and large scale program management of numerous projects and Kathleen, a registered professional civil engineer, was a project manager for many infrastructure and building renovation projects, including both design and construction aspects, in New England, Florida and the metro DC area. We lived in Washington DC for 12 years and upon retirement sold the house, putting a few things in a 5’x5’ storage unit and started traveling.

On return to the US in September 2018, after traveling to 21 countries, we bought a Class C RV – 2019 Thor Freedom Elite 24FE. We enjoyed our week long camping trip in New Zealand in a small converted van with few amenities, so this seemed liked a good way to tour the US. We hope to visit family along the way and as many US National Parks as possible.

UPDATE – the Covid pandemic made travel more difficult for us. We were abroad for several months when the pandemic started and returned to the US in July 2020. After several months in the RV to visit Utah and Albuquerque NM, we moved east, bought a house on the Northern Neck of Virginia, and sold the RV. For 2021 and 2022 we tended to our new house and cottage, gardens and various boats including a 18’ 1977 Marshall Sanderling catboat and a 25’ Steiger Craft Chesapeake fishing boat, and kayaks and a canoe. Hopefully travel will start again one day!!

May 2022