Fireworks Over NYC

Ten years ago today, I watched the fireworks shows over New York City. I had an unusual vantage point though - I was over the fireworks looking down on them from a plane!

Ten years ago today is the day I flew out of JFK Airport to go to Kenya for three and a half weeks. It was my first time outside of the United States, with the exception of visiting Quebec four summers earlier. On our way to Kenya, our plane stopped over in Saudi Arabia and I had to spend about eight hours in the airport waiting to connect to Kenya.

During my stay in Kenya, TWA Flight 800 was shot(?) out of the sky (did they ever come to a conclusion of what really happened to flight 800?), and a bomb was set off at the Summer Olympics. I spent a few hours in the United States Embassy in Nairobi helping someone we stayed with obtain a student visa. Two years later that building was bombed.

I got to see all kinds of free-roaming animals that you normally only get to see in a zoo, or maybe even never at all - lions, cheetahs, zebra, wildebeest, hartebeest, crocodile, hippopotamus, impala, dik dik, vultures, secretary birds, plus a whole bunch of others that I have written down someplace in a journal I had with me while I was there.