Never end a sentence in a preposition, no white after Labor Day, blah, blah, blog.

Thanks to all my readers for your very kind compliments; and to those who I’ll be meeting in less than five weeks, I am wildly excited. To answer some of your questions, the top photo on the blog is me in the Kalahari in Botswana last year (the Makgadikgadi Pans, to be exact), on what we call ‘Meerkat eve,” which coincided with the full moon of May (one month before their winter solstice) when the sun set and the moon rose almost simultaneously. Three-hundred-sixty degrees of nothingness. Breathtaking. The photo of me, avec pith helmet, was taken at Duba Plains in Botswana, seasonal home of the famous Dereck & Beverly Joubert (“Relentless Enemies” and swimming lions of the Okavango). And the image you may occasionally see of me and Rusty on the termite mound was taken at Duma Tau, near the Angola border in Northern Botswana. So what will the wildlife be in Burkina Faso? Rusty tells of hippo pools and serval cats. As for my own upcoming adventure with the local wildlife . . . we can only speculate.