Day 30.

June 11^th. This morning was a Set Route drive. Since the Nissan wasn’t working, and the Cruiser hadn’t been picked up from the shop, Anne and I stayed behind from the drive, and they took one vehicle. I slept in til around 8, which was absolutely glorious. I made my way to the data room and worked on my research til everyone got home around 11. I finished going through all my lion prides again, and taking out the data points from the prides that were just male sightings, as I have moved those all to separate files for males only. I had a little pow-wow with Judith, Justine, and Andrew, talking about our research projects. Then, we all ate lunch. The French girls made damper, which was really yummy fresh bread rolls, and a yummy salad. Some of us pulled our chairs into the sun to eat, because it was still so cold out. They told me it was about 10 degrees Celsius this morning, which feels like 0 degrees when you are driving. Brrr. Andrew said it was the coldest day they have had this year! After lunch, I worked on my project, as well as answering emails and dealing with some things from the real world back in the US,  ew. Hahah. We left for drive at 3. Since there are so many of us this week, we are split into Team 1 and Team 2, and we take two vehicles out for the drives. Lukas took my group out on the newly returned Cruiser. We headed out to find some rhino, and stopped for general game along the way. We stopped and identified a lot of tracks, which was cool, because I learned about some that I haven’t seen much of in the past month I have been here. I was with Courtney, Kayla, Justine, and Phil. The American girls were surprisingly good at identifying tracks. Lukas told me not to answer his questions to give the new volunteers a chance to guess, but they were spot-on with every question! They correctly ID-ed hippo, hyena, and baboon tracks, where I’m pretty sure I would have been wrong on my first day. The only one they couldn’t get at first was zebra. I am hoping they had some prior training, or maybe Toko did tracks with them this morning. If not, they are sure showing everyone else up. Even Lukas was impressed. We eventually caught up with the rhino. It was Balega, Ganda Ganda, Robin, and Bagheeri again, and we stayed with them for quite a while. When we left, the sun was setting and it began to get COLLLDDD. We drove around for a while, looking for nocturnals, and moving through an area where we sometimes see cheetah and hyena, but we basically only found impala and zebra. We did see a troop of baboons though, running down the road ahead of us. We had brought lap blankets, so we all sat snuggled up with each other, with the ice-cold wind freezing our lips and noses. We arrived home a bit before 7. I got to work some before dinner, which was chicken stir-fry. We didn’t eat until about 830, and people turned in quickly after eating. By 930, everyone was heading off, and I helped clean up before hitting the sack as well. Tomorrow, we are spending most of the day up in Pidwa North, which will be fun! We are taking lunch and staying up there for hours since it is so far away. Hopefully, I wil get some good lion sightings of the pride we haven’t seen lately!

Good afternoon, little girl :)

 In love with this shot. The sun was perfect!