My (Q, the Elder's) arrival in Johannesburg

Interloper Blogger, Quince (the Elder), here. I arrived in Johannesburg after the lovely 19 hour flight, only slightly worse for wear. Loved the window seat. Did NOT love having to climb over my middle-seat-mate’s sleeping self several times during the trip; I swear she did not get out of her seat even ONCE during the entire flight. I, on the other hand, once freed of my confines, found a lovely narrow little crossover between the two sides of the plane, in which I could sit on the floor and stretch, or get my feet over my head to keep them from swelling like puffy sausages as they now seem to do on long flights, and just in general contort myself into all sorts of positions just so long as they were nothing like the position of a person sitting in an airplane seat. I was eventually joined in this tiny space by two other women who immediately saw the genius of my discovery. One was an “English-Rhodesian” by birth, who lived much of her life in South Africa after her family fled the Mugabe regime, eventually married an American and moved to Seattle, and who was now returning to Johannesburg to care for her dying mother, and the other was an American Kundalini Yoga Instructor. The latter proceeded to put us through our paces. (Just kidding on the “paces” part, but she did make the case for KY (the yoga type, you silly people).
I flew through immigration like it was nothing, and my luggage was among the first bags out of the shute – all 90-100 pounds of it, the contents consisting almost entirely of things for the Hopkins/Macleod clan, although I did manage to squeeze in a few scraps of clothing, a few essential toiletries for myself, and a couple of pairs of shoes – one of which turned out to be a left foot of one pair of brown sandals, and the right foot of a completely different pair of brown sandals. The entire clan was at the airport waiting, standing tall over everyone else and waving, alongside Bill’s boss, Jon, and Jon’s daughter. Bill’s boss had graciously scheduled his layover in Johannesburg to coincide with my flight so that he and Bill could have a meeting at the airport while awaiting my arrival. So very nice of everyone to work their lives around me.
Perhaps this was karmic, but Mother Nature, by contrast, was not so compliant. It’s SUMMER in South Africa, right?? You sure couldn’t tell by the weather. It was cold and rainy rainy rainy. But it didn’t matter: it was so nice to have my feet on the ground (rather than propped up on a wall), and heck: I was on the continent of Africa for the first time in my life, about to embark upon a Great Adventure with absolutely great peeps! What could be better than that?