Birthday on the Nile

My birthday came in with a bang this year. Literally. A spectacular lightning strike accompanied (simultaneously) by the loudest crack of thunder woke me in my tent a little after midnight on the banks of the Nile. The lightning lit the skyline and I was reminded of another thing I would miss terribly next year: dramatic, loud, warm thunderstorms. I drifted back to sleep over the next ten minutes to the loud white-noise of the heavy rain, knowing it would ease up over the next hour, and the sun would greet us in the morning.
We spent the weekend in Jinja- a small town at the source of the River Nile just North of Lake Victoria in Uganda. Danny’s mom was completing her whirlwind trip around Uganda with a few days of R and R in Jinja, complete with a modified rafting trip: the family float. We jumped in a boat on Saturday morning and drifted down the Nile in the direction of Cairo. The trip was filled with monkeys doing acrobatics between acacia tree branches, birds singing and swooping along the banks and periods of jumping out of the boat and just floating down the fast water. It was a lovely end to Anita’s trip with us and a truly memorable birthday weekend.