Donations, Sleepless Nights and the Travel Club

Last week I took five bags of winter coats, lined sweatshirts, leather vests and wool shirts to Goodwill. Not all six of my husband's Pendleton shirts I had in the front closet got donated but four of them did. I held back his two favorites. It's not like I'm moving tomorrow so I can pull the rest of that "Band-Aid" off later. I also sent a wool coat that was way too big and I wish I hadn’t. I’d forgotten that I actually used it last year during our power outage to wear over another coat, but at the time I was making the decision to donate stuff I was going by the rule: If it doesn’t fit, don’t keep it. Of the seventeen coats in that closet I downsized to eleven with plans to get rid of two more this time next year. They’re old work coats and I still have some outside work to do---painting trim and thinning plants---and by the time I’m through with that, I can throw those coats in the trash. I'll probably let go of even more coats at the same time but for now I'm keeping two for every season plus my go-to-funerals coat.

After I pulled everything out of the closet and put back what I was keeping, I spent the evening sewing up dog toys to donate to the humane society the next time I have another reason to be in their neighborhood. When Levi was younger I used to buy him a new stuffie practically every time I went to the store and he’d chew holes in them just as often. That was back when I was involved in hardcore caregiving my husband and money was more plentiful than time. Levi remembers the toys are in the closet, though, every time I open the door he’s looking for the clothe grocery bag I keep them in. He was full of anticipation as I sewed away then tossed them out one by one for him to inspect but I told him, “Sorry Levi, you only get to keep what will fit in your toy box. No more overflowing box for you!"

The next day I took another hundred books off my library shelves to donate to the public library. When I dropped them off I found out that in addition to selling the collectible books online, any others that don't sell at their local used books sales eventually get donated to World Mission who in turn ships them to 3rd world countries. The gift that keeps on giving. That was my third, hundred book donation to the library and each day of sorting gets harder and harder. Boxing up a hundred books at a time doesn’t sound like a lot of work, at least not enough work that should haven taken a whole day, but I googled a lot of the titles to see if they’re worth trying to sell instead of donating. So far, I've held back about a three dozen for that purpose. Another hundred (?) books will need to be purged before I’m down to what I hope to keep or sell and I'm worried no one will know I'm smarter than I look without my books to give them a clue.

That night I settled in bed around 11:15 ready to watch Saturday Night Live but I woke up to pee just as it was getting over. I never saw a single minute of it! I was restless the rest of the night and around five, I finally gave up on trying to sleep and I got up. My brain just wouldn’t turn off! It kept going over where I can put what pieces of furniture in the unit where I’ll be moving, trying to decide if I'll be keeping the right number of bookcases. I’ve got eight now and I’ll end up with three but one will be set up as a media center and another will be in the laundry room, repurposed for utility shelving. Oak shelving is too classy for a laundry room but why would I sell a good shelf for peanuts, just to take those peanuts to buy a lesser quality utility-style shelf? That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Ohmygod, I’m turning into such a boring person! All I can think about is downsizing and I see no end to that kind of dialogue going on inside my head for many months.

I did go to a Travel Club presentation this week. It was a photo slideshow of an African Safari they took last summer. One of my friends in the group went on the trip so I already knew they had a great time and saw lots of interesting things. Another friend in the club wanted to go but they didn’t allow her to sign up for that particular trip---too remote for easy access to doctors. She’s 90 and that woman is always on the go, travels all over the place with no fears or hesitation even though she ends up in ER more times a year than Levi goes in for haircuts. Sometimes I wish I could be as gutsy as she is but she’s got a family who’d come collector her if she had a major medical issue and got left behind in a foreign country by the travel club but poor Levi, my Mighty Schnauzer, couldn’t get a passport if I had to depend on him to do that for me. I’m just sayin’ sometimes two-legged kids are better than four-legged kids.  

But in all seriousness, the seniors I know in the Travel Club---and they're all seniors---who are signing up for two-three trips a year are spending thousands-upon-thousands of dollars on travel and if I did that I'd be worried to death that I'd end up living out of a shopping cart under a bridge. One woman in the club lives in a sketchy neighborhood but she spent all of the insurance money her husband left her on travel and now she can't afford to move to a safer neighborhood and she had to get a job at 77 years old. Everything in life is a trade-off. She was fulfilling her husband's death-bed wish for her. I would have made the same death-bed promise but I would have been lying through my teeth and both my husband and I would have known it. ©

Hiking Africa

If you saw the movie, Out of Africa, the travelogue I went to this week would have caught your attention from the first few slides. They were of the plantation where Meryle Streep and Robert Redford roamed around while filming the movie and where the woman who wrote the memoir it’s loosely based on lived. She was a Danish woman who ran a 4,000 acre coffee plantation in Nairobi between 1914 and 1931. Our travelogue narrator says the place hasn’t changed much since the movie was made and you can even picnic in the exact same places as Streep and Redford did for a couple of scenes, high up on Kenya’s Oloololo Escarpment looking out at spectacular, panoramic views. I used to love that movie. I loved those views and so did movie goers. The movie won the 1986 Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

That was the only civilized place the travelogue covered. It was the starting point to a hiking safaris called The Great Walk of Africa. It’s a trademarked travel adventure tour that covers a 100 miles of hiking 3 to 6 hours a day, for 11 days covering 9 to 15 miles a day. Daytime temperatures: 80 to 90 degrees and at night it was cold enough to need hot water bottles in their cots to take off the chill. There are eight paying guests on each tour paying $7,000 each, plus you pay your own way to get to Nairobi. Along with the guests are four guides---two armed with guns, two with spears, plus fifteen others who move the camps each day and do the cooking and who mostly stay out of sight. The tour group walks in single file, five feet apart and you’re not allowed to talk which makes it easier to sneak up on the wildlife and to enjoy the smells, sounds, sights and feel of Africa as they follow the game trails first along the Tsavo River, then the Galana River in Kenya. It also makes it easier for the guides to protect the guests from danger if they’re not spread out and are paying attention to hand signals.

The speaker, a woman in her forties who lives very close by me, says she’s always had an incurable wanderlust and she’s gone on seven hiking tours like this around the world and this one, she said, was one of the greatest experiences of her life. She’s a paramedic as were a couple of her companions which would take some fear out of being off the grid. Even so, I can’t imagine me---even in my younger years---doing a trip like that. I’d be the one who’d have to go with a medical box full of allergy pills and potions for insect bites and hives and I’d still come back with malaria because mosquitoes love me. The company who does these hiking safaris’---Tropical-Ice---has been doing them since 1987 and they’ve only had one client charged and injured badly by an animal, a rhinoceros, and they’ve never had to kill an animal. A shot in the air usually keeps them from getting too close. The scariest part, our speaker said, was crossing crocodile infested water and they’d group up as close as they could, holding on to the person in front of them, hoping to fool the crocs into thinking they are a large elephant splashing across the river. Rhinos, though, are considered to be the most dangerous of the animals in Africa. They are “grumpy” and let humans know their presence isn’t appreciated.

I will never leave the country to take a trip like that. I will probably never even leave the state. Heck, I’ve even passed on several great day trips planned for this summer through the senior hall. But this speaker was inspiring none the less. “There is nothing better than enjoying the world when you leave your devices behind,” she said, “get out and walk around the block if you can’t go anywhere else.” And I learned that elephant dung is not gross or smelly, looks like a pile of bread loaves and is mostly grass. You never know when information like that will come in handy. She told about coming upon a dead elephant and a pride of lions was waiting in the bush to feed on it, none too pleased to have their meal interrupted. They concluded the elephant had died of natural causes and they called it into the wildlife people who flew in to harvest the tusks to take back and burn as part of their effort to stop the ivory trade. She said they were so heavy she couldn’t even lift one off the ground. One of the ladies in the audience said she thought that was so wasteful to burn that ivory when it’s worth so much. She got booed by several people to which she retorted rather loudly, "Well, it IS wasteful!"

This summer our speaker is giving another lecture about the efforts being made in elephant conservation and I signed up to go. She told us about one of their guides who had spent several decades working for Kenya’s wildlife department and had personally killed twenty-three elephant poachers which is legal there to kill them on sight. And don’t get me started on the fact that Trump quietly reversed a law Obama put into place banning big game trophy hunters from importing the spoils of their kills. The photo of his son proudly holding up an elephant’s tail he’d just cut off still disgusts me. In my book, trophy hunters are pond scum. Hiking a 100 miles across Africa and only bringing photographs back home is more “manly” than killing majestic creatures just for the “fun” of watching them die and hanging their heads on your wall. ©

A National Geographic’s article about The Great Walk of Africa