Did you ever, in all your travels, have a trip from leaving the house to returning to the house without a single hitch? Well, we did, even including air transportation. Now who ever heard of perfect on time flights?

Sharon, your itinerary sold me on the deal and after dreaming about this for around 50 years, I had some pretty high expectations. Well, ADS met them all. Unfortunately for ADS, in terms of its evaluation form (which frankly was silly), it was impossible to exceed my expectations. How can anyone exceed an expectation of perfection? After all if we stay at a five star hotel it should be perfect, and it was. But why quibble about a form?

Everything went as smoothly as promised–from arrival at Arusha to final departure from Arusha. And in between: Wow. Our guide, Ally, was fantastic. He seems to have binocular vision: he spotted animals at five hundred yards while driving along on twisty, incredibly rutted roads. He really took good care of us. He was very knowledgeable, very solicitous and an easy conversationalist. And topping all that, he understood and laughed at my dry sense of humor. What a pleasure!

We saw all of the so-called “big five” and everything else to boot. We saw a bunch of lions feasting on a freshly killed cape buffalo (we might have missed the kill by less than an hour). Most interesting experience? We were twenty feet away from a new born gazelle, maybe five minutes old, struggling with its first few steps and learning how to suckle; unfortunately, something went wrong with those shots, we’ll see. All lodges were great and food was fine, even the picnic packs.

We’ll follow with selected photos. Have no doubt, everyone we talk to will know how great Sharon Lyons and ADS are. By the way, my granddaughter Alix did her own blog, meant more for her college friends but very interesting (http://alixinafrica.wordpress.com/). She had the same fantastic time that we did.

Bob Litke
Somerset, New Jersey
Safari Dates: January 8, 2013 to January 16, 2013